JENIN (West Bank), Nov 23: Israeli armoured vehicles entered the West Bank town of Qabatiyeh in the northern West Bank on Saturday and started searching houses for militants, Palestinian security sources said.

The Israeli army confirmed an operation was under way there.

Qabatiyeh is about 10 kilometres south of Jenin on a road leading to Tubas, where the army arrested 10 militants on Friday, including Mohammad Dararneh, the local chief of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.

Meanwhile Israeli forces blew up three homes belonging to Palestinian militants on Saturday during a military operation in the West Bank city of Bethlehem launched after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 11 people.

In fresh violence in the Gaza Strip overnight, four Israeli sailors were wounded when a Palestinian fishing boat loaded with explosives blew up near their naval ship patrolling the Gaza Strip coast, the army said.

The death of a senior United Nations relief official in an Israeli-Palestinian gunbattle drew UN accusations that Israeli forces delayed an ambulance summoned to evacuate the Briton after he was shot.

The latest surges in Israeli-Palestinian violence come at a time when the United States is keen to see calm in the region so it can woo Arab support for a possible war on Iraq.

Israeli armour rumbled into Bethlehem in the West Bank early on Friday and took up positions across the city in response to the suicide bombing on Thursday.

Military commanders said they were searching for around 30 militants from the Bethlehem area involved in carrying out the bombing and planning more attacks against Israelis.

“There are several dozen (wanted militants) and if we manage to catch them, we will have saved many lives in Israel,” a field commander, identified only as Lieutenant-Colonel Guy, told Israel’s Channel Two television.

On Saturday, Palestinian residents said troops demolished the homes of three militants belonging to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group linked to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction.

The Bethlehem-area house of the bomber behind Thursday’s blast was destroyed by Israeli forces on Friday along with the house of a wanted Jihad militant in the city.

“We are...urging the Israelis, in the course of their operations, to keep in mind the consequences of their actions, to complete these operations as quickly as possible and to take steps to avoid further civilian casualties,” US State Department spokesman Philip Reeker told a daily briefing.

Reeker said progress on “realising Palestinian aspirations”, diplomatic code for setting up a Palestinian state, was impossible as long as Palestinians carried out attacks like Thursday’s suicide bombing of a Al Quds bus.

Iain Hook, manager of the Jenin camp rehabilitation project run by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), was hit by bullets that tore into his trailer in a UN compound while Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen exchanged fire nearby.

ANNAN DISTURBED: At UN headquarters in New York, a spokesman said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was “very disturbed by the fact that the Israeli Defence Forces refused immediate access for an ambulance which had been summoned by UNRWA” to evacuate Hook.