NABLUS, Feb 6: Six Arabs and two Israeli soldiers were killed on Thursday in the latest flare-up of violence, including two male nurses gunned down by an Israeli helicopter outside a Gaza City hospital.

Two of the Palestinians were shot dead after ambushing Israeli troops at a position on the southern outskirts of Nablus, a northern city which like most of the West Bank has been occupied since last June.

The ambush and subsequent firefight cost the lives two Israeli soldiers, Lieutenant Amir Ben-Aryeh, 21, and Staff Sergeant Idan Suzin, 20. A third was wounded.

A caller in Nablus claimed the attack in the name of both the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the armed wing of the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The slain men were identified as Anan Hanani, 19, of the PFLP, and Ahmed Hamed, 20, of the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades.

Hours earlier, an Israeli helicopter gunship rained down heavy machine-gun fire on a hospital compound in eastern Gaza City, killing two male nurses as they ran outside to see what was happening and calm their terrified patients, a hospital statement said.

They said Omar Hassan, 26, and Abed al-Karim Loubed, 41, were killed in the compound surrounding the al-Wafaa hospital for the elderly where they both worked in the al-Shajiyeh district.

Several bullets also penetrated the hospital building, but no one else was wounded.

The army was investigating the killings, while military sources admitted choppers had opened fire on “open spaces” during Gaza operations overnight.

Later on Thursday, an Arab man was shot dead by Israeli security forces after attacking a border policeman in the north of the country near Umm El-Fahm, an Israeli Arab town just outside the West Bank, police spokesman Gil Kleiman said.— AFP