Children waving flags shout during the mourning march for ten-year-old girl Mausa Abu Zanon, in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza strip, October 9, 2002. Mausa Abu Zanon died while playing outside her house, when Israeli soldiers fired machine guns from their tanks, Palestinian witnesses and hospital officials said.

Occupied Jerusalem: 9 October, 2002 (IAP News)

Encouraged by international silence and tacit America approval, the Israeli occupation army kept up its reign of murder and terror against Palestinian civilians.

Palestinian hospital sources reported Wednesday that a 10-year-old school girl was shot dead at the Brazil Refugee camp in Rafah at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip.

According to eyewitnesses, the girl was killed while sitting in the veranda of her home.

An Israeli spokesman issued a routine statement, saying the army was investigating the “death of an Arab.”

Meanwhile, another Palestinian civilian, a 17-year-old boy, succumbed to his fatal injuries which he sustained in the pre-dawn massacre at Khan Younis Monday, bringing the number of victims to 16 dead.

Another 75 civilians, including many children suffering from burns and deep wounds, were still being hospitalized in Gaza hospitals with ten people listed in serious to critical condition.

On Tuesday, the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon described the atrocity as a “big success,” vowing to carry out more operations against civilians in the Gaza Strip.

Sharon dismissed international criticisms of the carnage as “hypocritical.”

Elsewhere in the West Bank, the Israeli occupation army destroyed at least two homes in Salfit south west of Nablus Wednesday on the ground that a member of the two families to which the homes belonged took part in an attack on messianic Jewish terrorists in the West Bank.

Israel routinely demolish Palestinian civilians’ homes, a harsh tactic regarded by the international community as a war crime.

Since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli military occupation two years ago, the Israeli army demolished and dynamited more than 2000 Palestinian homes.

The number of Palestinian homes destroyed by the Israeli army since 1967, when the Zionist state occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, is estimated at 30,000.

In 1948, Israel leveled more than 480 Palestinian towns and villages in what is now Israel and expelled their inhabitants at gunpoint to neighboring Arab countries.

Palestinian workers carry the body of Maysaa Zanon, 10, to the morgue at Najar hospital in Rafah southern Gaza Strip, Tuesday Oct. 8, 2002. Zanon was killed by Israel troops while she was at her family home near the Rafah border between Egypt and Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials said.