The body of a 3-year-old Palestinian girl, who medics said was killed by shrapnel during an Israeli airstrike, at a hospital morgue in the central Gaza Strip, Dec. 24, 2013. Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters

Israel launched a series of airstrikes Tuesday in the Gaza Strip that killed a 3-year-old girl and wounded nine other people, one critically, medical sources said.

The strikes came after the shooting death of an Israeli man who an army spokeswoman said was doing maintenance work on the security fence in northern Gaza.

Witnesses in the occupied territory said that Palestinian fighters fired mortar rounds at Israeli military vehicles east of the fence near Nahal Oz and that an ambulance evacuated one person.

The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a Palestinian group, claimed responsibility for the shooting, according to Israeli media.

"One of our snipers hit an Israeli officer, who is in the engineering forces of the Israeli army," Haaretz quoted the PRC as saying.

In a statement through a representative, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed concern over the escalation in violence and condemned the killing of the Israeli civilian. The statement said the Secretary General "deplores the death of a young child in Gaza from Israeli retaliatory raids today as well as a number of Palestinian civilian casualties since Friday."

A series of explosions could be heard in Gaza City on Tuesday afternoon. Health Ministry official Ashraf al Kidra said one airstrike killed a young girl and wounded three relatives. The 3-year-old was identified as Hala Abu Sbeikha. Her mother and brother were also injured in the strike, in al Maghazi refugee camp, according to Maan News Agency. Kidra added that a man was killed in an Israeli attack in northern Gaza.

Armed groups in Gaza view Israel, which evacuated Jewish settlers and military from the territory in 2005, as an occupier because it controls most movements in and out of Gaza. Israel sees Gaza’s government, Hamas, as a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction.

Recent severe flooding in Gaza exacerbated the humanitarian crisis in the region, and continuing unrest in neighboring Egypt has made made preventing an escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas even more difficult.