GAZA CITY (AFP) -- A 10-year-old Palestinian girl and a Hamas resistance fighter were killed early on Wednesday by Israeli tank fire in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian emergency services and witnesses said.

Hadeel al-Smeiri died and two members of her family were wounded east of Khan Yunes when a tank shell hit a house, the medic and witnesses said.
A resistance fighter from the armed wing of the ruling Islamist Hamas movement was killed a short time later in the same area, again by tank fire, the sources said. The man's identity was not immediately known.
An Israeli military spokesman in Tel Aviv told AFP that ""Israeli ground forces opened fire Wednesday morning on Palestinians near Khan Yunes, around the security barrier"" separating the Gaza Strip from Israeli territory.
On Tuesday Israeli troops killed three Hamas fighters in Gaza City and wounded five more people, after the military said mortar rounds were fired at southern Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was presiding over a meeting of the security cabinet on Wednesday to decide whether to launch a full-scale incursion into the Islamist Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip in a bid to end Palestinians resistance attacks.
At least 497 people, nearly all Palestinians and the majority of them Gaza resistance fighters, have been killed since Israeli-Palestinian peace talks resumed in November, according to an AFP count.