AL QUDS, Dec 1: Israel re-tightened its grip on West Bank towns on Saturday following a suicide bombing two days earlier, as US envoy Anthony Zinni prepared to tour the Gaza Strip after vowing to stay “as long as it takes” to secure a ceasefire.

Zinni roundly condemned the Thursday attack on a bus in northern Israel that left three Israelis and a suicide bomber dead, accusing radical Palestinian groups of trying to sabotage his mission.

“The groups that do this are clearly trying to make my mission fail, this mission to try to end this violence and to get back on the path of peace,” Zinni said on Friday.

While the retired US Marine Corps general was talking, Israel was taking action.

The army reinforced its presence around the hotspot West Bank towns of Jenin and Nablus, a military source said Saturday.

The move around Jenin was taken for the “pure and simple reason that six of the seven Israelis killed in attacks in recent days were victim of (suicide bombers) from that town”, the source told AFP.

“We have also tightened the blockade around the suburbs of Nablus, but our forces have not penetrated Palestinian sectors, neither there nor in Jenin,” the source added.

Separately, Palestinian security sources said Israeli forces entered the Palestinian-controlled West Bank town of Al Khalil and the nearby area of Dura early on Saturday.They said the soldiers arrested three members of Islamic Jihad, as well as temporarily detaining three Palestinian security personnel.

An AFP correspondent also said the army had tightened its closure on Al Khalil, a predominantly Palestinian city that is unwilling host to a small group of Jewish settlers.

Israeli public radio said Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer ordered the increased deployment because he considers the two towns to be “nests of terrorism.”

It quoted sources close to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, currently on a five-day visit to the United States, as saying Sharon had ordered a response to recent anti-Israeli attacks.

Zinni arrived in the region on Monday with US Assistant Secretary of State William Burns in a bid to broker a lasting ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians and get the two sides back to peace talks.

The very next day, Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a bus station in northern Israel, killing two Israelis and wounding more than two dozen others before being shot dead.

And on Thursday, a member of the radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad blew himself up on a public bus elsewhere in northern Israel, killing three Israelis and wounding six more.—AFP