A seven-year-old Palestinian girl was killed yesterday as she was eating lunch in her home. Israeli troops had opened fire in response to a mortar attack which wounded four residents of a nearby Jewish settlement.

Relatives said that a single Israeli bullet had passed through Rana Sian's head and hit her father in the leg as the family sat at the table eating rice and meat in their home in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip.

Palestinian medics said the Israelis were retaliating for the earlier mortar attack on the Gaza settlement of Neveh Dekalim which seriously injured an 18-year-old man and an eight-year-old boy. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, which also slightly injured two other men.

THE Pentagon has admitted that the war on terror and the invasion and occupation of Iraq have increased support for al-Qaeda, made ordinary Muslims hate the US and caused a global backlash against America because of the "self-serving hypocrisy" of George W Bush's administration over the Middle East. The mea culpa is contained in a shockingly frank "strategic communications" report, written this autumn by the Defence Science Board for Pentagon supremo Donald Rumsfeld. On "the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds", the report says, "American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended". "American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of, and support for, radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies."

The US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was today attacked by gunmen, with a car bomb exploding in front of the building. Early reports suggested that four Saudi guards were killed in the attack, and 18 local staff taken hostage.

U.S. troops fought a gunbattle with insurgents along a busy street in Baghdad on Monday, sending passers-by scurrying for cover, witnesses said, while five U.S. troops were reported killed in separate clashes in a volatile western province as insurgents step up attacks ahead of next month's elections.