AL KHALIL, Sept 1: Israeli forces killed five Palestinians on Sunday, a day after five others died in a messy targeted killing, prompting Palestinian officials to hit out at Washington for its silence in the face of the slaughter.

Witnesses insisted at least four of those killed Sunday were civilian workers, sparking Palestinian charges Israel was practising “state terrorism” after two children aged six and 10 died in the helicopter strike late on Saturday.

Four Palestinian men in their twenties, including two brothers, were shot dead early on Sunday in an army ambush which the military said had thwarted a planned strike on a Jewish settlement near the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron.

The army said wire-cutters, an axe and clubs were found on the bodies of the dead, whom they said had either been about to launch an attack or had been scouting the land to prepare for a later strike.

The Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions said the army had taken the men from the stone-cutters’ quarry where they worked, shot them in “cold blood” and then put their bodies outside the settlement to make it look like they had been about to attack.

The army denied the accusation. In the northern West Bank, a Palestinian youth was shot dead during an intense firefight in the refugee camp of Jenin, the scene of escalating clashes in the past week, a Palestinian security source said.

Abdel Karim Bassam Sadi, 18, son of the local chief of the Al-Quds Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the radical group Islamic Jihad, was fatally shot in the chest.

Troops backed by dozens of tanks and other armour entered the camp at dawn on Sunday, witnesses said.

The killings came a day after an Israeli helicopter blew up a car near Jenin carrying a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Fatah movement, who was also a member of the Palestinian military intelligence service.

Four other people were killed in the missile strike against Rafaat Daraghmeh, 26. —AFP