Two Italian Red Cross workers were released shortly after midnight on Tuesday, hours after being kidnapped in the afternoon, Palestinian security officials said.

Two gunmen had kidnapped the two aid workers in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials said, the latest in a string of abductions of foreigners in the area.

The officials said the Italians, both employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were captured in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza. Other Palestinian security sources, however, said that the two had been abducted in the town of Khan Yunis.

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The Red Cross suspended its field work in the Gaza Strip after the abduction, a spokesman said.

"The International Committee of the Red Cross has suspended its field operations in Gaza Strip following the kidnapping of two employees of the Italian Red Cross in Gaza," Iyad Nasir, a spokesman in Gaza for the ICRC, said.

He said Red Cross employees would continue to work in Gaza but inside their offices and would intervene only in "urgent" matters of life and death situations.

An ICRC spokesman in Jerusalem, Simon Schorno, identified the kidnapped men as Claudio Moroni, 36, and Ginmarco Onorato, 63.

"The ICRC confirms that two Italian Red Cross representatives were kidnapped by unknown persons in Khan Yunis this afternoon," Schorno said. "We are doing our utmost to ensure their immediate and unconditional release."

Schorno said there was no immediate claim for the kidnapping. Palestinian security officials said they were searching for the men.

A gunman shot and wounded a former Palestinian cabinet minister from the once dominant Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, sources in Fatah said.

Abdel Aziz Shahin, still a top Fatah official, is a leading critic of the ruling Hamas government. His condition was not immediately clear.

IDF kills top Hamas commander
Earlier Tuesday, IDF troops launched a three-pronged offensive in the northern Gaza Strip, killing a top Hamas commander in the latest operation against Palestinian rocket squads.

But militants persisted with the rocket fire, launching five homemade
projectiles, including three that landed in southern Israel. One critically wounded a man in the town of Sderot, a frequent target, striking the ground just half a mile (1 kilometer) away from a convoy carrying the United Nations' top human rights official, who was touring the town.

The IDF confirmed operations in northern Gaza, but provided no details.

The operation on Tuesday began in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City, then fanned out to the outskirts of Jebaliya and Beit Lahiya, about 7 kilometers (4 miles) away.

Ground troops, backed by helicopters, tanks and snipers who took up positions on rooftops, stormed the home of Ayman Hassanin, a local leader in the military wing of the ruling Hamas group, witnesses said.

Gunmen streamed to the area as troops called on loudspeakers for Hassanin and his brother, Ibrahim, to surrender, said the militants' mother, who identified herself only as Umm Mahmoud. A fierce gunbattle erupted, and Aymen Hassanin, 26, was killed, Hamas said.

A 70-year-old woman was also killed in the battle, Palestinian medical
officials said.

The operation in Gaza City was the first in months in the coastal strip's
largest town. It came hours after two Hamas militants were killed in an
Israeli air strike after nightfall Monday.

Thousands of Hamas supporters took part in the militants' funeral procession on Tuesday. Gunmen fired rifles in the air, chanting, "Revenge, revenge," as a recorded speech of a Hamas leader assassinated by Israel was broadcast in the background.

By late morning, the troops had left Zeitoun.

After dawn, troops entered the town of Jebaliya. Bulldozers plowed over farms, ripping up irrigation systems and destroying greenhouses and fields. A main electricity transformer, which provides about 60 percent of the power to the Zeitoun neighborhood, was also destroyed.

Four people, including at least one Hamas gunman, was wounded when a tank
shell hit a group of fighters, witnesses said.

Israeli bulldozers demolished a factory between Jebaliya and Beit Lahiya,
located in the same area where rockets were launched Tuesday morning. Troops also razed land on the outskirts of Beit Lahiya and took up positions on high ground.

A spokesman for Hamas' military wing, Abu Obeidah, told a news conference that the armed resistance would continue so long as Israeli "aggression" did. He advised Israel to "empty Sderot of its residents" until the "aggression" stops and said, without elaborating, that the militants' homemade rockets had become more accurate and longer-range.

For the first time ever on Tuesday, Hamas broadcast a live feed from the
battlefield on Palestinian TV. Footage showed Israeli tanks firing, and land mines blowing up near the tanks. One rocket was fired live during the broadcast.