JENIN, May 14: Israeli troops used Palestinian civilians, including women and young children, as human shields in an operation on Wednesday to capture wanted militants in the West Bank city of Jenin, witnesses said.

An undercover unit of soldiers dressed as Palestinians moved into the centre of the autonomous city and stopped two civilian cars less than 100 metres away from the house sheltering the militants.

The soldiers forced some of the occupants out of one and used the vehicle to approach the house before opening fire on the building, near the central hospital.

Ewa, a 24-year-old Polish-British woman volunteering with various local humanitarian organisations, said she approached the scene of the clashes when she heard the first shots being fired.

“I joined three girls, aged four, six and nine, and a very distressed woman who were not allowed to leave the scene of the fighting and forced to sit on the floor against a wall facing the targeted building,” she said, declining to divulge her surname.

“Palestinian men were then brought out of the building, handcuffed and forcibly thrown to the ground,” before the assault was completed, she said.

“I was briefly allowed to leave and when I came back with water for the woman, who needed medical care, I was shoved to the ground and we had to sit against the wall,” said the human rights activist.

“Some soldiers were standing beside us holding big metal shields to protect themselves, and others were behind the wall against which we were sitting, hurling grenades inside the building where the men were,” she explained.

Her account was corroborated by a correspondent on the scene and a neighbour, 42-year-old Mahmad Rehat, who said the human shields were kept for around an hour, while the army was shooting at the building.

Three militants were finally captured, including a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a radical offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group.

Said Atatra, a nurse at the hospital, said a boy was killed and six other Palestinians wounded during the clashes, stressing that all of them were hit inside the hospital compound.

“When the shooting started, many of the civilians and neighbours of the house took refuge inside the hospital walls,” he explained.

Israeli and Palestinian rights groups have documented several cases of Israeli troops using civilians, often children, as human shields during their almost daily West Bank sweeps for suspected militants.

The Israeli supreme court last year issued a temporary ban on the use of human shields but never outlawed it completely, in spite of several petitions filed by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem.

FIVE PALESTINIANS KILLED: Israeli forces shot dead five Palestinians in clashes in Gaza and the West Bank during the day, drawing Palestinian accusations that Israel was trying to sabotage a new US-led peace initiative.