JERUSALEM — Palestinian attackers tunneled close to a heavily fortified Israeli outpost in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday, set off a massive explosion, then raked the base with gunfire, killing five Israeli soldiers and wounding seven, the Israeli military said.
Two Palestinian militant groups, Hamas and the Fatah Hawks, claimed responsibility for the highly coordinated assault on the outpost, only a few yards from the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.
Israel said it viewed the incident -- the largest single-day loss of life for its army in more than six months -- as extremely grave.
With less than a month before the Palestinian Authority's Jan. 9 presidential election, officials on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had hoped to maintain relative calm in the West Bank and Gaza. Sunday's fighting represented the most intense outbreak of violence in the Palestinian territories since the Nov. 11 death of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Gunfire and explosions rocked the area for hours after the 4:30 p.m. attack.
Palestinian residents said that combat helicopters buzzed overhead and more than a dozen tanks rumbled into position after dark near the Rafah refugee camp.
At least two Palestinians, one identified as a fighter and the other as a civilian, were killed in the wake of the outpost attack, Palestinian hospital officials said.
Earlier in the day, Palestinians said five schoolchildren under the age of 12 were wounded by Israeli fire in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, also in southern Gaza. The army said it was targeting Palestinian militants who had fired mortar rounds into the adjacent Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim. A 7-year-old Palestinian girl was killed a day earlier in similar circumstances in Khan Yunis.
In the militants' Rafah assault, Israel said three soldiers were rescued from the outpost under fire and flown to hospitals.
The crossing, which is normally thronged with Palestinians, closed for the day when the explosion occurred. Israel came under strong international criticism when it shut the Rafah frontier for three weeks over the summer after receiving warnings of such an attack.
"We had feared something exactly like this," said an army spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal. "Because of the presence of civilians, this crossing point was defined by terrorists as a soft spot."
