Israel plane kills two Egyptian police

CAIRO: Two Egyptian policemen were killed on Thursday when an Israeli plane fired a rocket near the border at militants it was tracking after deadly attacks, the official MENA news agency reported.

The incident took place near the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, the agency quoted a military official as saying, from where Israel believes militants planned separate attacks that killed seven in the country earlier in the day.

"An Israeli plane was pursuing infiltrators on the other side of the border until they reached Rafah and fired at them. There were several Central Security members there and they were hit by the gunfire," the official told MENA.

State television reported that the two police conscripts were killed southwards from Rafah near Taba, roughly 12 kilometres (about 8 miles) from the Israel town of Eilat close to the site of the attacks.

Security officials, who at first said the two men were killed by gunmen, said the incident took place south of Rafah, along the border with Israel.

The identified the Israeli aircraft as an Apache gunship that had been tracking the militants who attacked two buses, a civilian car and a military jeep. Israeli officials blamed militants in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, where they carried out a retaliatory air raid that killed six people, including the head of the group blamed for the attacks.(AFP)