Hamas said on Saturday that it had fired rockets at Israeli targets to revenge a bomb blasts that killed seven Palestinians in Gaza on Friday.

Hamas, which took power in March after winning a election earlier in the year, declared it would launch more such attacks. The rocket attack has been the first time since it agreed to a truce 16 months ago.

Among those killed in the Friday explosion on a Gaza beach, which Hamas said was caused by the Israeli armed forces, three were children aged 1, 3 and 10.

"This is only the start," said a spokesman for Hamas's Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades. "Next time, the rockets will be longer in range and they will hit places deeper inside the Zionist entity." he said.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Israeli side that any of the rockets had hit Israeli targets.

The Israeli army, which fires artillery on a regular basis at parts of the northern Gaza Strip used by militants to fire rockets over the border, said it had suspended all shelling and promised an investigation.

"We did not fire into a place where there were innocents," Major-General Yoav Galant told reporters. "We are exploring two possibilities, a wrongly aimed artillery shell or an independent incident we were not involved in."

Source: Xinhua