BETHLEHEM, May 25: Israeli troops entered the autonomous Palestinian region of Bethlehem on Saturday night, while helicopters buzzed overhead, Palestinian witnesses said.

The Israelis blew up the home of the local head of Islamic Jihad in the West Bank town.

Armoured Israeli transport vehicles entered the Bethlehem region from the east and also entered around Beit Jala, which borders the Jewish settlement of Gilo on the outskirts of east Jerusalem, witnesses said.

It is the first raid into Bethlehem since Israeli troops ended a five-week siege of the city on May 10.

It was the final West Bank city occupied as part of Israel’s Operation Defensive Wall, launched on March 29, when the army seized seven of the eight major Palestinian cities in the West Bank.

Troops poured into Bethlehem on April 2 and quickly became bogged down in a stand off with Palestinians trapped in the town’s Nativity Church.

That siege only ended the second week of May when the European Union brokered the exile of 13 militants to Europe and 26 others to the Gaza Strip.

Woman, niece die: Israel pressed ahead on Saturday with its policy of raids in autonomous Palestinian areas, leaving a woman and her 12-year-old niece dead in the Gaza Strip and sweeping the West Bank town of Tulkarem after a series of suicide bomb attacks earlier in the week.

A woman and her 12-year-old niece were mortally wounded by Israeli fire when an army unit, backed by tanks, entered the El-Boureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, Palestinian security sources said.

They later died from their injuries.

In the West Bank, Israel detained about 100 Palestinians in its incursion into Tulkarem, although the army would only confirm it had arrested four people in its house-to-house search.

The soldiers withdrew to the outskirts of Tulkarem Saturday afternoon, the army said in a statement.

The troops had been hunting members of Palestinian militant groups in the area since Friday, with one soldier killed and two others wounded, one seriously, in a shoot-out.

The soldiers clashed with members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group, at the entrance to the Tulkarem refugee camp, the security sources said.

Six Palestinians, including a woman, were also wounded in the exchange of gunfire, according to Palestinian hospital sources.

Most of the city had been placed under curfew Saturday, the security sources said.

The Palestinian-controlled town lies on the border between the West Bank and Israel and is often used as a hub for suicide attacks inside the Jewish state.

A Palestinian baby boy also died Saturday after his mother was forced to give birth at an Israeli army checkpoint near Bethlehem, medical sources said.

Israeli soldiers thwarted what may have been a planned suicide bombing, arresting a 16-year-old Palestinian who was wearing an explosive belt in a taxi in the northern West Bank.

The Palestinian youth and three other suspects were nabbed in the taxi during a routine check on a major West Bank axis linking the towns of the army has also imposed a curfew on several dozen Palestinian towns in the West Bank along the Green Line, according to army radio.

The Palestinian leadership issued a statement on Saturday calling for the international community to stop the Israeli incursions.—AFP