TEL AVIV, Jan 15: Unidentified men shot dead two Israelis on Tuesday in apparent revenge for the killing of a Palestinian wanted by Israel in a bomb blast, further straining an already battered truce.

Israeli officials said a 72-year-old settler, who also held a US passport, was killed outside Bethlehem in the West Bank and a woman was shot dead hours later near the Jewish settlement of Givat Zeev, five kilometres north of occupied Al Quds.

“Our heroic troops in Beit Sahour fired on a filthy Israeli agent which led to his immediate death,” the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said in a statement, referring to a village near Palestinian-ruled Bethlehem.

An Israeli government spokesman denied the Israeli was an agent. Police identified the dead man as Avi Boaz, who was born in Israel and lived in Maaleh Adumim settlement.

“This is another, but not the last, response to the assassination of the martyr Raed al-Karmi,” the Brigades said. Karmi, blamed by Israel for the death of nine Israelis, was killed by a bomb in the West Bank city of Tulkarm on Monday.

Hours after Boaz’s death, two men approached a car near a petrol station at the entrance to Givat Zeev and opened fire from close range, killing one woman from the settlement and wounding another passenger, an Israeli security official said.

On Monday, the Brigades, affiliated with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, killed an Israeli soldier and wounded an officer in a first revenge attack hours after Karmi died in the bomb blast.

The tit-for-tat killings further eroded the ceasefire Arafat declared on Dec 16 under intense international pressure to end a wave of suicide bombings.

An Israeli military liaison officer near Bethlehem said Boaz had been travelling with a Palestinian companion to buy building supplies and was seized by gunmen at a Palestinian police roadblock and taken away to be shot.

Colonel Sharon Levy said Boaz was handicapped and had an artificial leg and eye. The killers, he said, pumped 20 bullets into his body which was later delivered by Palestinian liaison officers along with the car to Levy’s office.

“We can see again that the Palestinian Authority is playing here a double game, maintaining publicly that there is a ceasefire and on the other hand doing nothing when an Israeli is being assaulted,” said Israeli government spokesman Avi Pazner.

Despite the spasm of attacks, the U.S. State Department said on Monday Secretary of State Colin Powell had not decided when to send envoy Anthony Zinni back to the region to resume mediation between Israelis and Palestinians. Zinni went home on Jan 6.

A leaflet distributed to news organizations on Monday and purported to be from the Brigades said the ceasefire was dead.

But a spokesman for Fatah, the most important faction in the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation, said on Tuesday the Brigades’ leadership had not authorised the leaflet.

“The Fatah movement is committed to the ceasefire order and asks everyone to remain committed to this decision,” he said.

Israeli security sources said Israel was behind Karmi’s death but Defence Minister Binyamin Bin-Eliezer told reporters the militant was killed in a “work accident”, meaning the premature explosion of a bomb he was preparing.

Official confirmation from Israel that it killed Karmi would mark the first use of its internationally condemned policy of tracking and killing guerillas since Arafat’s ceasefire call. —Reuters