TEL AVIV, June 21: Israel decided on Friday to press ahead with its reoccupation of West Bank self-rule towns, as 10 Palestinians were killed in the army’s hunt for guerillas after a wave of attacks on Israelis.

Faced with mounting Palestinian attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s cabinet decided troops would remain inside Palestinian self-rule towns as long as it takes to put an end to suicide bombings and shooting rampages, government sources said.

In 72 hours, three Palestinian attacks — two suicide bombings and a raid on Thursday on a Jewish settlement in the West Bank — have cost 31 Israeli lives, as well as two soldiers killed in fighting in the West Bank.

On the Palestinian side, the death toll rose to 17 since Tuesday.

Israeli troops had taken over all or parts of six of the main West Bank Palestinian towns by Friday, but the army’s presence appeared only to fuel the bloodshed.

Although the cycle of violence has stalled a US peace initiative, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat issued a call for “no more war” and said he believed he could reach a peace agreement with hardliner Sharon.

In an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, Arafat said that “enough is enough” and that he now accepted a framework for peace first made by former US president Bill Clinton.

On the ground, five Palestinians, all but one of them children, were killed as Israeli troops and Palestinians battled in Jenin, site of some of the heaviest fighting in the intifada.

In a rare admission, the army admitted its tanks had wrongly opened fire, causing civilian deaths.

Violence raged across the occupied territories, with four Palestinians also killed in Gaza and the Israeli army pouring into Nablus, hours after a Palestinian killed five Israelis in a nearby settlement.

The Palestinian was shot dead by soldiers, the army said.

Despite the flexing of its muscle, the army failed on Friday to police a band of Itamar settlers who killed a Palestinian after they attended the funeral for the five settlers shot dead the previous day.

Israeli tanks, in answer to Palestinian gunfire, raked Jenin downtown with shells, medical sources said. Some struck about a kilometre to the north, killing four Palestinians, medical sources said.

“An initial inquiry indicates that the (Israeli) force erred in its action,” an army statement said.

The army opened tank fire on a group of people who “broke the curfew” on the city of Jenin, where soldiers were carrying out “house to house searches in search of an explosive lab”, the army said, vowing an investigation.

Before dawn, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was killed and five members of his family wounded in Jenin when Israeli soldiers blew up a house close to their own, a Palestinian hospital source said.

The army rounded up 400 Palestinian men aged between 15 and 50 in the village of Wadi Birkin, near Jenin, and took them to a nearby military base, Palestinian security sources said.

LAND GRAB: The Nablus reoccupation was part of Israel’s new policy of grabbing Palestinian land in response to attacks on its citizens.