An Israeli missile strike killed three Palestinian militants and two Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, a day after one of the deadliest attacks since Hamas seized the territory in June, medical workers told Reuters.

Bodies are loaded into an ambulance in the southern Gaza Strip Tuesday, after three Islamic Jihad militants were killed in an Israeli missile strike.
(Adel Hana/Associated Press)

Tuesday's attack was against militants operating near the border fence with Israel in the southern part of the coastal territory, an Israeli army spokesman said.

The Israeli military confirmed one of its aircraft had fired at armed men as they approached the Israel-Gaza border fence near Khan Younis. Palestinian medical staff told reporters that three armed members of the militant group Islamic Jihad were killed.

The children killed in Gaza, 10 and 12 years old, were members of the same extended family, said Dr. Muawiya Hassanin of the Palestinian Health Ministry. A third child, 10, was seriously wounded and six other people were lightly hurt, all of them civilians, Hassanin told the Associated Press.

Palestinian rocket teams have been known to send in young children to retrieve rocket launchers after firing, the Israeli army said.

"In light of the reports [of dead children], it seems likely that this was the case here," the army said in a statement.

Earlier, a member of the secular militant group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was also killed in a clash with Israeli troops, said residents from a refugee camp.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that later in the day, two Qassam rockets were fired from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip into the southern Israeli region of Negev.

One hit a kindergarten in the city of Sderot, causing damage but no injuries because children were on summer vacation. The second crude rocket hit an open area.

On Monday, the territory experienced its deadliest single strike in the two months since the Islamists took control of the Gaza Strip.

Six Hamas militants were killed when Israeli fire struck their jeep in the central Bureij refugee camp.

With files from the Associated Press