NABLUS (West Bank), Feb 23: Five Palestinians were killed and six wounded by Israeli troops on Thursday in the deadliest clashes in the West Bank since last month’s election victory for Hamas.

The men died amid heavy shooting in the Balata refugee camp after more than 30 Israeli army jeeps and four bulldozers piled into the area adjoining the flashpoint city of Nablus.

Three of those killed were members of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a radical faction loosely affiliated to Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah party.

They had exchanged fire with Israeli troops while holed up in a house.

Medical sources named the dead men as 32-year-old Hamudeh Shtewi, Mohammed Al-Surakji, 20, and Mohammed Abu Khamis, 32.

An Israeli security source charged that the three were involved in the shooting deaths of two Israeli settlers in January 2005 and of an army company commander in May 2004.

The source added that a large amount of weaponry and ammunition was found in their hiding place.

Two other Palestinians, one of them a teenager, were killed earlier in what was the second deadly Israeli military operation in the area since Sunday.

Naim Abu Saris, 22, was fatally shot while on the roof of his house, while 19-year-old Ibrahim Saidi died from bullets in the abdomen as troops targeted a group of stone-throwing youths.

An Israeli army spokeswoman told AFP the three Al-Aqsa militants had opened fire on soldiers who had come to arrest them.

“The IDF (army) had come to arrest several wanted Palestinians inside a house. Several gunmen opened fire at them. One soldier was moderately-severely wounded,” she said.

Six other Palestinians were wounded, including one seriously. A US peace activist was also shot in her hand, medical sources said.

Witnesses said that troops had opened fire on Palestinian rescue workers and towards foreign peace activists, wounding an ambulance driver and a nurse.

The Israeli military imposed a curfew and blocked all entrances to the camp while soldiers took up positions on surrounding buildings.—AFP