GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli troops backed by tanks and aircraft went after Gaza militants who bombarded southern Israel with rockets and mortars Saturday, killing 46 Palestinians in the deadliest day in Gaza since Islamic Hamas militants seized control in June.As many as two dozen civilians died in the fighting, including at least two babies and two other children. Two Israel soldiers were also killed. Gaza Health Ministry official Dr. Moaiya Hassanain said 160 people were wounded and 14 were in critical condition.The intense battles pushed the Palestinian death toll to 76 since fighting flared Wednesday. About 40 of them were civilians.Palestinians leaders called the killings ”genocide” and threatened to call off peace talks with Israel.”We tell the world, watch and judge what’s happening, and judge who is committing … terrorism,” said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.Chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia said Palestinian leaders including Abbas recommended suspending peace talks at a meeting Saturday in the West Bank town of Ramallah.”I think it will be suspended,” Qureia said. ”What is happening in Gaza is a massacre of civilians, women and children, a collective killing, genocide,” Qureia added. ”We can’t bear what the Israelis are doing, and what the Israelis are doing doesn’t led the peace process any credibility.”In Syria, exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal described Israeli attacks against civilians in Gaza as ”the real Holocaust.”Israeli officials met Saturday to discuss the Gaza violence and its implications for peacemaking. Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said talks didn’t preclude fighting. Talks are ”based on the understanding that when advancing the peace process with pragmatic (Palestinian) sources, Israel will continue to fight terror that hurts its people,” he said.On Friday, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai renewed a threat to invade Gaza to crush militant rocket squads that attack southern Israel daily.The spike in violence came just days before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to arrive in the region on her latest peacekeeping mission.Palestinian fighters kept up a steady stream of rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli targets, undeterred by Israeli troops backed by tanks and attack aircraft. Six Israelis were wounded, all but one of them slightly, in rocket fire that reached as far north as Ashkelon, 11 miles from Gaza.The bloodletting began before midnight Friday in the northern town of Beit Hanoun, where a 13-month-old girl, Malak Karfaneh, was killed by shrapnel. Hamas blamed Israel, but residents said a militant rocket fell short and landed near the baby’s house.Before dawn Saturday, the battleground shifted to Jebaliya, a center of militant activity in northern Gaza. Israeli aircraft also traveled further south to demolish a two-story house belonging to a Hamas militant in Gaza City. In that attack, a woman and baby were killed alongside another Palestinian. By early evening, 46 Palestinians were dead.Palestinian rocket fire earlier in the week also killed an Israeli man. On Thursday, militants raised the stakes by firing Iranian-made rockets into Ashkelon, a coastal city of 120,000 people closer to Israel’s heartland.Not all of the Gazans killed on Saturday were immediately identified, but at least 13 militants and 17 civilians died. The civilians included two unidentified children, a 17-year-old girl and her 16-year-old brother, a 45-year-old man and his 20-year-old son, and two sisters thought to be in their early 20s.The sisters and another civilian were killed by tank shells that struck two houses in separate attacks, Palestinian officials said.The Israeli military said it was unaware of tank shells hitting houses. At one of the damaged houses, paramedics rushing an unmoving woman lying on a stretcher, her face covered with a cloth, out of a room clouded with dust.One of the unidentified boys was killed during a series of four evening airstrikes, a medical official said.Elsewhere in Jebaliya, a wounded man and boy lay in a gutter near a dead man. Ambulance workers took away the dead man as a youth appealed to paramedics to treat the wounded.”Take them, they are still alive,” he pleaded. Another man urged the wounded to ”bear witness,” or proclaim their Muslim faith before they die. The two began reciting a Muslim prayer near a boy whose lower body was ripped by shrapnel.Tareq Dardouna, a Jebaliya resident, said a relative was killed outside his home in the crossfire that began at 3 a.m. 1 2 Next Page %26#x00bb;
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