GAZA CITY - Eight Palestinians were killed and at least 50 wounded on Friday night when Israeli warplanes launched a raid on a building in the Gaza Strip, medics and witnesses said.
The Israeli aircraft targeted the home of top Islamic Jihad fighter Ayman al-Fayed in the Bureij Palestinian refugee camp south of Gaza City, killing him and two of his children, a boy and a girl, they said.
A woman was among the other four dead, the medics said, adding that the fate of Fayed's wife and three other children was not known.
Around 50 people, including around 20 children, were wounded when the house was hit by a missile, they added. Most were family members.
Apart from Fayed the dead and wounded were all civilians, the medics said.
The Fayed house was completely destroyed in the attack and at least 10 other houses were damaged by the blast, witnesses and an AFP correspondent said.
Emergency services were searching through the rubble to see if any people had been buried under the debris.
Medical sources identified Fayed, 42, as a top commander from the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad. The group's spokesman Abu Ahmad confirmed his death.
A neighbour, who declined to be identified, said that Fayed's family was inside the house when it was hit and many were killed or wounded.
Hundreds of Palestinians gathered outside the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital south of Gaza City after the attack and chanted calls for revenge, an a media correspondent reported.
Its corridors and those of the territory's main hospital, Al-Shifa in Gaza City, were filled with the wounded.
The impoverished Gaza Strip is home to eight refugee camps, and Bureij is both the smallest and the most populated.
A military spokesman in Tel Aviv denied Israeli involvement in the blast.
Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Saturday dismissed the Israeli military denial of responsibility for the deaths of eight Palestinians in an explosion in the Gaza Strip late on Friday.
"We condemn the Israeli crime perpetrated against the Bureij refugee camp," Sami Abu Zuhri, spokesman for Hamas.
"Israel bears full responsibility and will also suffer the consequences," he said.
"The enemy is trying to deny responsibility for this crime, but it alone is responsible and all of its denials will change nothing," said a statement from the Islamic Jihad movement.
At least 180 people, mostly Palestinians, have been killed since Israel and the Palestinians relaunched formal peace talks in November.
The latest deaths brought to 6,140 the total number of people killed since the eruption of the Palestinian uprising in 2000, most of them Palestinians.
Blair blasts Britons over Iraq war