12:04am UK, Monday February 02, 2009

Israeli aircraft have bombed Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, the Islamist group said.

A rocket fired from Gaza during the 22-day war

It comes after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed a “disproportionate” response to mortar fire that injured three Israelis.

The Israeli aircraft carried out three strikes but there were no casualties.

One attack was on a security headquarters in a village in central Gaza residents said had been vacated after Israel telephoned warnings to Palestinians to leave buildings that housed any weapons.

The other two strikes were on suspected sites of tunnels along the border with Egypt, Hamas said.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

The Israelis wounded by mortar fire included two soldiers and the first Israeli civilian hurt since a January 18 truce ended Israel’s 22-day offensive in the coastal enclave.

About a dozen rockets and mortar bombs fired from Gaza struck Israel today, most causing no casualties, the military said.

A wing of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group belonging to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, said it fired some of the rockets, but not all were claimed.

Israeli leaders have taken a hard line against rocket fire in the run-up to a February 10 national election, which opinion polls predict right-wing leader Benjamin Netanyahu will win.

“The government’s position was from the outset that if there is shooting at the residents of the south, there will be a harsh Israeli response that will be disproportionate,” Olmert said at the weekly cabinet meeting.

“We will act according to new rules which will ensure that we will not be drawn into a war of incessant shooting on the southern border, which would deprive the residents of the south of a normal life,” he said, without elaborating.

Palestinians in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, not far from the village targeted, received recorded voice messages by telephone warning “everybody who is near any place used for terror or weapon storage facility or tunnels, should evacuate the area immediately”.

Similar warnings have preceded Israeli attacks in the past.