TEL AVIV, Sept 5: On the eve of the Jewish New Year, two Israeli soldiers and one Palestinian were killed in the Gaza Strip.
A state of alert was clamped on northern Israel after Palestinian militants tried to drive in a van loaded with 600 kilograms of explosives, police said.
Police at a roadblock stopped two suspect vehicles east of the Israeli town of Binyamina, 60 kilometres north of Tel Aviv, near the border with the West Bank.
The occupants of the vehicles fled in a car, leaving behind the van, whose explosive charge was linked to the fuel tank and was to be activated by a mobile phone, the radio added.
Police sappers blew up the device.
The discovery of the explosives-laden van sent shockwaves through Israel, which has been spared attacks since a suicide bomber blew apart a bus in the north on Aug 4.
SOLDIER KILLED: An Israeli soldier was killed and three others wounded when their tank ran over a powerful explosive charge in the southern Gaza Strip, the army said in a statement.
The incident occurred near the central Kissufim crossing point, on a track used by units patrolling the security fence that seals the narrow Gaza Strip off from Israel.
The blast was claimed by the Popular Resistance Committees, a group made up of former members of all hardline factions who have put ideological differences aside to focus on military aspects of the conflict.
The group has also laid claim to two previous attacks which destroyed elite Israel tanks earlier this year, killing six soldiers.
In another incident, an Israeli army officer was killed and another soldier slightly wounded when a Palestinian sniper opened fire on them near the Jewish settlement of Nitzanit in the northern Gaza Strip, a military spokesman said.
“A Palestinian sniper opened fire on an Israeli army unit which was checking that a road was safe. An officer was killed and a soldier injured,” the spokesman said.
Israeli soldiers then rushed to the scene and shot the gunman dead, he added.
The militant was identified by Palestinian officials as Mahmud Siyam, a 22-year-old member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group.
Siyam’s body was later handed over to the Palestinian authorities and transferred to Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, medical sources said.
The army had earlier said that two soldiers had been wounded in the attack.
INCURSIONS: Israeli tanks also staged two incursions in the Gaza Strip, moving into autonomous territory in Deir al-Balah, while the army destroyed four houses in the southern town of Rafah and arrested three Palestinians there.
After the Rafah incursion a Palestinian civilian was shot through the chest by Israeli soldiers on watch-towers that line the Egyptian border running through the town.
The army also arrested eight suspected militants in and around the northern West Bank city of Nablus, six of them from the Hamas.—AFP
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