By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) - A Palestinian rocket launched from theGaza Strip killed one person in Israel on Wednesday, the firstsuch fatality in nine months, after Israeli forces killed eightmilitants in the Hamas-controlled territory.
The rocket attack, claimed by Hamas, seemed certain toincrease public pressure on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ordertougher military action in the Gaza Strip, including a possiblewidescale ground invasion.
Mounting violence could complicate peace talks betweenIsrael and President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority,negotiations which the United States hope can lead to astatehood deal this year.
"Israel will take the necessary steps to bring these lethalrocket attacks to an end. Those attacking us will be confrontedby an Israel that is compelled to defend itself, and that ishow we shall proceed," said David Baker, a governmentspokesman.
Earlier in the day, five militants, senior members ofHamas, were killed when the van in which they were travellingwas attacked from the air near the southern Gaza town of KhanYounis, medical officials said.
Local residents who knew the men said some of them hadundergone training in Syria or Iran and returned home afterHamas breached the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt last month indefiance of an Israeli blockade of the territory.
Abu Ubaida, spokesman of Hamas's Izz el-Deen al-QassamBrigades, denied they had travelled outside the Gaza Strip,whose border with Egypt has been resealed.
Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip in June, struck back byfiring more than 25 rockets at southern Israel, and two othermilitants were killed in an Israeli air strike on a launchingsite in the northern Gaza Strip, medical officials said.
A militant from the Islamic Jihad group was killed in aseparate air attack east of Bureij refugee camp in the centralGaza Strip, medical workers said.
Hamas says attacks from the Gaza Strip, including rocketsfired by its own militants and others, are a response toIsraeli \\military operations in the territory and the occupiedWest Bank and would end if Israel stopped all such activity andlifted its blockade.
No one had been killed in Israel by a Palestinian rocketstrike since May 2007.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli undercover forceskilled one militant and wounded and detained four others, aPalestinian official said.
The men had been confined to a Palestinian securityheadquarters as part of an Israeli amnesty for militantsaffiliated with President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, buthad left the compound, a Palestinian official said.
(Additional reporting by Atef Sa'ad and Labib Nasir inNablus and Ari Rabinovitch and Avida Landau in Jerusalem,Writing by Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Editing by SamiaNakhoul)
