Explosion at Hamas rally kills 15 and wounds 80 Palestinians

At least 15 Palestinians were feared dead and 80 wounded after a large explosion at a Hamas rally in a Gaza City refugee camp yesterday. Reports said a pick-up truck with masked militants carrying two home-made rockets had exploded. Officials at Gaza City's Shifa hospital said 10 of the wounded were in serious condition.

Some said the dead included Ahmed Randur, believed to be a leader of Hamas's military wing, who was among several faction leaders at the rally.

There were initial claims from within Hamas that an Israeli drone had been flying overhead and that a missile had been fired, but other Palestinian sources were increasingly sure the blast at the Jebalya camp came while home-made missiles being paraded at the rally detonated, apparently accidentally.

The Israeli Army was adamant in denying any involvement in the blast which hospital officials said had also taken the lives of two children and two gunmen. Some witnesses said body parts had been pulled out of a car which appeared to have been destroyed.

The rally was supposed to be the last mounted by Hamas under an agreement struck on Thursday with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, that the Palestinian factions were to cease holding military parades in the Gaza Strip.

Before the rally, several Qassam rockets were fired by Islamic Jihad at Israel in retaliation for an Israeli police operation earlier in the day near the West Bank city of Tulkarm in which officials said they had shot dead three wanted men from the faction. Hamas has claimed responsibility for the most recent suicide bombings this year in Tel Aviv and Netanya.

Israeli police from the elite Yamam unit entered the village of Ilar early yesterday. The Israeli Defence Forces said three Islamic Jihad gunmen fled and opened fire on the officers, and no members of the Israeli forces had been hurt.

Mr Abbas called the killings in Tulkarm a "dangerous and unjustified action', adding: "We are exerting efforts to maintain the ceasefire and they are doing this action without any reason." Mr Abbas said he protested to Israel and the United States, calling for an end to such raids.

The military correspondent for the newspaper Haaretz said two of the suspects were killed in an open area outside the village, and security forces found two rifles, a pistol and ammunition next to their bodies. Police reportedly chased the third suspect and found him before dawn in a house in a nearby village. He was killed in an exchange of fire.

Palestinian witnesses named two of the dead as Jamil Abu Sa'ada and Saed al-Ashkar, head of the Jihad's military wing in his village. Israeli security sources said Abu Sa'ada was behind the attacks this year on the Stage club in Tel Aviv and on a shopping mall in Netanya which together claimed 10 Israeli lives.

Although the ceasefire was broadly agreed by Mr Abbas and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister in February, the Israeli government ­ from Mr Sharon down ­ has made it clear that it will continue to target wanted men from Islamic Jihad over suicide bombings.

In a raid in the same area on 25 August, which the army chief of staff, Dan Halutz, later described as "ill-timed", two of five men killed were believed to have been unarmed teenagers.