GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories, July 17, (Agencies): Seven people were wounded in Gaza on Sunday by what Palestinian medical sources said was an Israeli air strike, but Israel denied it had carried out any such raid.
Adham Abu Selmiya, spokesman for the Hamas-run medical services in the Gaza Strip, said four children and three adults suffered moderate injuries in air strikes in the northern Beit Hanun area.
But a spokeswoman for the Israel Defence Forces told AFP “there was no IDF activity in Gaza overnight or this morning.” The reported raid comes after days of rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel and four straight days of retaliatory Israeli air strikes between Tuesday and Friday night.
The Israeli military said four rockets were fired from the coastal territory into Israel over the weekend, bringing to 20 the number of munitions — including both rockets and mortar rounds — fired from Gaza since July 1.

The uptick in violence comes after months of relative calm that followed a flare-up in tensions in April, when an anti-tank missile fired from Gaza hit an Israeli school bus, killing a teenager.
Israel responded with a series of air strikes that killed at least 19 Palestinians in the deadliest violence since Israel’s devastating 22-day assault on Gaza in 2008-2009.
The violence raised fears of another similar offensive, but on April 10 Gaza’s Hamas rulers declared a return to the truce that ended Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in January 2009.
On Sunday, Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot reported a “dramatic rise” in the number of rockets being smuggled into Gaza, citing intelligence sources, who said the increase was the biggest since the end of Operation Cast Lead.
The newspaper reported that intelligence officials believe around 10,000 rockets have been stockpiled in the Palestinian territory, with the weapons flowing more easily into Gaza with the breakdown of security in Sinai after the overthrow of the Egyptian government.
“The working assumption in the... (military) Intelligence Branch is that, among the 10,000 rockets currently in Gaza, there are several Fajr-5 rockets with a range of 70 kms (44 miles), several hundred Grad rockets with a 40 kilometre (25 miles) range and hundreds more Grad rockets with at least a 20 kilometre (13 mile) range,” the newspaper reported.

Criticism
Meanwhile, backers of a bill calling for a parliamentary investigation of Israeli human rights groups said Sunday they would press forward with the initiative this week, despite growing public criticism and opposition from the prime minister.
The contentious bill comes on the heels of a law passed last week to punish local people who call for boycotts of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Critics say the bills violate the right to free speech, and the recent legislation has sparked a fierce debate over the limits of Israeli democracy.
At the weekly meeting of his Cabinet on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week’s boycott bill, which allows settlers to sue boycott supporters for financial damages, was necessary to battle “attempts to delegitimize” Israel. But he said he would oppose the new legislation to investigate rights groups.
“We must act systematically and prudently regarding the steps we are taking,” Netanyahu said. “We must protect our system of law and the rule of law, the courts and our enforcement agencies. Therefore, we will act cautiously.”
The nationalist Yisrael Beitenu, or Israel is Our Home, party is behind the new bill to investigate the funding of leftist NGOs. The party’s leader, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, criticized Netanyahu for his opposition on Sunday and said the groups in question aided terrorism.
“These are not leftist groups and they are not human right groups. These are terror groups and organizations that help terror and people who aide terror,” Lieberman said.

Yesh Din, one of the three groups singled out by Lieberman, accused him of incitement.
“The foreign minister’s methods are reminiscent of the methods applied by dark regimes, in order to cope with those who were deemed as government critics,” said Yesh Din attorney Michael Sfard.
The new legislation is the latest in a string of nationalistic legislation approved during the Netanyahu government over the past two years.
Adherents say the measures are needed to preserve Israel’s Jewish identity. But critics say the laws are thinly veiled attempts at marginalizing Israel’s Arab minority.
In another report, Israeli police on horseback on Saturday clashed with hundreds of ultra-Orthodox protesters hurling stones and garbage bins as part of a campaign to stop a public parking lot from opening on the Jewish sabbath.
Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for national police, said police deployed at a downtown intersection to prevent protesters from carrying out plans to block a main road.
“There are about 800 there, and objects are being thrown at police. Mounted police are dispersing them,” Rosenfeld said. Reuters television footage showed a protester denouncing one officer as a “stinking Nazi.”

There were no immediate reports of any injuries or arrests in the protest that disrupted a section of predominantly Jewish populated western Jerusalem.
The demonstration pointed up mounting tensions between a politically influential religious minority and Israel’s secular Jewish majority population who spar on a regular basis over the degree to which public policy should be shaped by religion.
Six Israeli policemen were injured earlier this week in a separate confrontation with protesters in an ultra-Orthodox section of Jerusalem in a raid on alleged tax evaders.
Israeli media reports said Saturday’s protest marked the anniversary of the opening of a public parking lot over the objections of religious politicians and was also called to demand a main road running by their neighbourhood be shut on the sabbath.
Jewish law bans travel on the sabbath along with other forms of routine activity regarded as work but most Israelis do not abide by that restriction.