Israeli forces have killed three Palestinians, two fighters and a 17-year-old girl, during fresh clashes in the Gaza Strip, medical workers say.

The killings on Saturday brought to 37 the number of Palestinians killed in a four-day period.

The air raids follow the death of an Israeli civilian in a Palestinian rocket attack on Wednesday.

Another Palestinian girl and a senior munitions expert for Hamas were killed in separate missile strikes in the Gaza Strip late on Friday, medical officials and Hamas sources said.

One-year-old Malak al-Kafarna died of a shrapnel wound to the head some hours after a missile landed near her home in Beit Hanoun, also in the north, Raed al-Arini, a doctor at Shifa hospital said. She was the second infant killed this week.

The Israeli army confirmed it had targeted the area.

Eyad al-Ashram, a Hamas member, died when an Israeli missile struck open ground after dark in the north of the territory.

Hamas officials described the explosion, in which four other civilians were also wounded, as being caused by an Israeli surface-to-surface missile.

Earlier on Friday a Palestinian civilian died of wounds sustained the previous day in an Israeli attack.

Also on Friday 13 people, six of them children, were wounded in separate Israeli strikes in Gaza.

Broader offensive

Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, said on Thursday that "a major ground operation was real and tangible" and that Israel was "not afraid of it".

Barak's threat of a full-scale invasion came on the same day that Israel killed five children playing football in a missile attack.

Plea for pressure

A Hamas spokesman told Al Jazeera that Israel should be pressured by other countries to put an end to the raids.

"We know that the Gaza Strip is a small area. It is open for Israel - they can kill most of the Palestinian people and destroy everything," Ghazi Hamad said.

"The job of the international community is to stop the Israeli crimes in the Gaza Strip."

On Friday, a senior Israeli defense official said that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah", the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defense minister told Israeli army radio that "the more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger 'shoah' because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."

The word "shoah" is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas official, strongly criticized Vilnai's comments.

"We are facing new Nazis who want to kill and burn the Palestinian people," he said.

PHOTO CAPTION 

One of the 37 Palestinians killed during four days of Israeli raids in Gaza [AFP]

Al-Jazeera