Six Palestinians, Israeli officer killed in clashes

A Palestinian house is detonated by the Israeli army in the northern West Bank city of Nablus yesterday. An Israeli army officer and six Palestinians were killed in exchanges of fire earlier in the day around the Ain Beit Ilma refugee camp. The shooting occurred during an operation aimed at arresting wanted Palestinian activists. PHOTO: AFP

In the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops killed two Palestinian militants who tried to attack their guardpost on the Kissufim road leading to the boundary with Israel, military sources said.

Violence in an almost four-year-old Palestinian revolt is sputtering on in the extended run-up to Israel's planned 2005 evacuation of all settlers from Gaza and some from the West Bank.

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Israeli army commandos raided a residential building in the Ein Beit-Ilma refugee camp in the city of Nablus before dawn, killing two senior men from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), residents and military sources reported.

The Israeli army said special forces Lieutenant Moran Vardi, 25, was killed and three other soldiers wounded in a gunbattle.

Residents said the commandos also shot dead two neighbors -- a 50-year-old Palestinian academic and his 16-year-old son -- at the door of their apartment.

Israeli military sources said a militant who survived the initial gunfight had taken refuge in a flat next door.

The wife of Khaled Salah, an engineering professor at Nablus's al-Najah University, told Reuters that troops who banged on his apartment door shot him as soon as he opened it and then his son standing behind him.

Palestinian security sources identified the dead militants as Yaman Faraj, the PFLP's West Bank commander, and a deputy.

Residents in Nablus, the main urban stronghold of West Bank militant groups, said Israeli forces later dynamited the PFLP militants' hideout in Ein Beit-Ilma.

In Gaza, military sources said two Palestinian gunmen crept to within 20 meters (65 feet) of the army post near Kissufim and opened fire with automatic rifles and grenades. Soldiers returned fire and killed both, they said.

Soldiers backed by tanks and helicopters also entered the Gaza refugee camp of Rafah in another in a series of searches for tunnels used to smuggle in weapons from nearby Egypt.

Rafah residents said troops were flattening abandoned shops in one neighborhood. Medics said two Palestinians were lightly wounded by gunfire into the camp.