JENIN (West Bank), May 14: Two leaders of the Islamic Jihad were among six Palestinians killed by Israeli troops on Sunday during an eruption of violence in the northern West Bank.
Five of the victims died in the village of Qabitiya, south of the flashpoint town of Jenin where a member of the intelligence service was also killed in exchanges outside his office.
Doctors, meanwhile, announced that an American teenager wounded in an Islamic Jihad suicide attack in Tel Aviv last month had died of his injuries.
News of 16-year-old Daniel Wultz’s death came as a top-level Israeli delegation began a visit to Washington, designed to lay the groundwork for a White House summit later this month between the new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and US President George W. Bush.
Sources on both sides said the fighting in Qabatiya broke out during an arrest operation targeting Jihad followers who were holed up in a house.
The militant leaders were identified as Moatessem Shaar and Elias al-Ashkar, both aged 28 and members of the Al-Quds Brigades.
Their bodies were found in the rubble of the building which had been the focus of the fighting as Israeli bulldozers began razing the structure.
Security sources said at least one of the other victims was a member of the Islamic Jihad. Another casualty was a 21-year-old resident who was killed after he threw stones at the forces.
Meanwhile, a guard outside the Palestinian Authority’s local intelligence headquarters in Jenin was shot dead by Israeli troops.
Palestinian security sources also said Israeli special forces had tried to kill Mahmoud Saadi, the overall leader of the Jihad in the Jenin area, by shooting at his vehicle in the village of Birqin.
Saadi was hit in the chest and legs but his injuries were not thought to be life-threatening, the sources said.
The Israeli army’s determination to pursue Jihad followers was bolstered by an April 17 suicide attack in Tel Aviv which was the deadliest bombing in 20 months.
The toll from the attack rose to 11 when Wultz, who was on holiday with his family from Florida at the time of the blast, lost his fight for life.
The Hamas-led Palestinian government was heavily condemned by the international community in the aftermath of the Tel Aviv bombing over its failure to condemn the attack.
Hamas itself has not carried out any suicide bombings for over a year but its refusal to renounce the use of violence and recognise Israel’s right to exist since forming its first government in March has led the US and the European Union to freeze aid payments.
Despite being unable to pay any government employees for more than two months, Hamas premier Ismail Haniya pledged his regime would not be forced into toning down its platform.
“The aim of the siege that has been imposed on us is to force the government to back down, to abandon the rights of our people and to impel us to take reckless decisions,” he said in Gaza.—AFP
