GAZA CITY, March 6: Israel piled punishment on the Palestinians on Wednesday, killing 11 and losing two of its own soldiers as Arab and world leaders warned of the dangers posed by this escalation.

Syria sounded alarm bells warning of an “explosive” Middle East and a top Palestinian official said it had become a “moral obligation” for the world to intervene and put an end to Israeli state terrorism.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan joined the fray, telling Israeli and Palestinian leaders bluntly that history would judge them harshly for what he called the appalling carnage inflicted on their peoples.

For his part, US Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s policies towards the Palestinians, particularly after Sharon said on Monday Israel was at war against them.

But Sharon, who marked a year in office on Wednesday, kept up the pressure.

He told public radio the current crackdown, which has killed nearly 100 people in the past week, most of them Palestinians, is “necessary”.

Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinians carrying explosives near military checkpoints in the northern West Bank in two separate incidents.

One man was killed on the outskirts of the Palestinian town of Qalqiliya after he threw a Molotov cocktail and a grenade at soldiers manning a checkpoint, the Israeli army said.

Minutes earlier the army said soldiers intercepted two Palestinians carrying black bags filled with explosives near Nablus, killing one and wounding the other. The latest deaths brought to 1,381 the number of people killed since the intifada broke out in Sept 2000.

As evening fell on the West Bank, Israeli helicopter gunships rocketed a Palestinian police station near Bethlehem and a security post in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian security sources and witnesses said.

Earlier in the day, three Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were killed in an army incursion near Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.

The Hamas group claimed responsibility for killing the two soldiers, but said the attack happened in Israeli territory.

Four Palestinians were also killed during an operation by Israeli marines near Beit Lahia.

Later, Israeli tanks backed by gunships made an incursion into the Palestinian-controlled territory of Beit Hanun, in the northern Gaza Strip.

That came after Palestinian home-made rockets fired from the northern Gaza Strip hit a Jewish community in Israeli territory for the first time on Tuesday, injuring four people.

In Gaza City, Israeli F-16 fighters pounded a Palestinian security building, injuring at least five people, and gunships rocketed two targets in Al Khalil, southern West Bank. Another Palestinian died of wounds received in a raid in the West Bank on Tuesday.

SYRIAN FM: Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara warned in Iran that the “situation in the region is explosive” and accused Israel of not wanting peace “by rejecting the Saudi peace plan even before knowing its content”.—AFP