Fresh fighting in the Gaza Strip killed at least 20 Palestinians, one of them a cameraman working for the British news agency Reuters, and three Israeli soldiers yesterday.

The violence erupted after dawn, when Israeli troops at the heavily guarded border fence spotted armed Palestinians close to the boundary and sent in forces to intercept them. The Israeli soldiers were ambushed by another group of Hamas fighters, who killed three of them and wounded three. Earlier clashes in the volatile border areas had left four Hamas gunmen dead.

As fighting intensified later in the day Israeli helicopters launched four missiles at the Bureij refugee camp in the centre of the Gaza Strip, killing nine people, including two children and an elderly man, medical aides said. One of the airstrikes killed the Reuters cameraman Fadal Shanaa, 23, who had been filming Israeli tank movements. A colleague who was driving behind said that the photographer’s vehicle, clearly marked with “press” stickers, exploded as it was struck by a missile. Another rocket landed as people rushed to the wreckage. Two bystanders were killed and Shanaa’s assistant was seriously wounded.

After a period of relative calm, fighting has resumed in Gaza, threatening to escalate to the violence of recent months when Hamas and other hardline groups fired hundreds of missiles into southern Israel, and Israel struck back with bloody raids into Palestinian towns, killing more than 100 people in a single day.

Blockade drains life from Gaza

The movement of goods into Gaza had been intermittent at best since Hamas won Palestinian elections early last year

Multimedia

• Pictures: Johnston is released

• Video: unarmed protester confronts gunman in Gaza

• Pictures: life in Gaza

Background

• Q&A: Hamas and Gaza

• 97 days and counting for BBC's man in Gaza

• Now war is with the enemy within

• The little girl trapped by a quirk of war

Related Links

• Israeli civilians killed after border stormed

• Kidnapped Israeli soldier 'still alive'

The area calmed down in recent months as Egypt tried to broker a ceasefire. With Gaza under almost total blockade, the population of 1.5 million is running short on fuel and basic goods, and observers predict a new explosion of violence by the Islamists.

Jimmy Carter, the former US President who brokered Israel’s first peace deal with an Arab state in the 1979 accord with Egypt, is due to meet Mahmoud Zahar, one of Hamas’s senior leader, in Cairo as part of a regional peace mission.

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