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Holmes: Waiting for more violence in Gaza City
(CNN) -- Violence flared Sunday in the Middle East as Israel's election day drew near. CNN's Michael Holmes spoke with Anchor Heidi Collins from Gaza City about the latest bloodshed. HOLMES: I can tell you the salvos back and forth in this conflict continue. In the last hour, some five Qassam rockets were fired by Palestinians into Israel on the northern border of Gaza. We saw three or four of them take off from our position here into Israel. Now this follows the biggest, the deepest incursion by Israeli forces into Gaza City since the start of the intifada some two years ago. Twenty-five, 30 tanks, bulldozers, armored vehicles came into Gaza overnight, backed, according to Palestinians, by at least two Apache helicopters. Their targets were metal workshops. Israel says these workshops are used in the manufacture of mortars and these Qassam missiles, which are fired fairly regularly into Israeli areas. They destroyed those 40 workshops -- also, the homes of three Hamas militants. Palestinians say the workshops were civilian workshops, and the gun battles that ensued as this operation went on left 12 Palestinians dead -- 65 of them wounded, the youngest a 16-year-old boy. They had shrapnel wounds and gunshot wounds. We were at the hospital just a short time ago. And also we witnessed the funerals, as they got underway, of these Palestinians. Most of them were fighters. It has to be said Palestinians claim some of them, however, were civilians. Now, senior Palestinians tell us that they believe that this was a show of strength by [Israeli Prime Minster] Ariel Sharon in the lead-up to this election, which of course takes place in day or so from now. Israel denies that; says that this was a strike against what they call a major infrastructure of terror. So with these rockets being fired in the last hour by Palestinian militants, the question being asked in Gaza is: Will the tanks come back this night?
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