JENIN, Nov 9: Israeli forces killed a top military leader of the Islamic Jihad on Saturday, raising the spectre of new violence on the eve of a US envoy’s mission to the region to advocate calm.

The Israeli forces killed Iyad Sawalha in a house-to-house hunt in the West Bank city of Jenin, which drew a new pledge of revenge from militants on the eve of a meeting of Palestinian factions to discuss halting suicide attacks in Israel.

Palestinian sources said Sawalha, 28, was the head of Islamic Jihad’s military wing in the northern West Bank and at the top of Israel’s wanted list for planning suicide attacks that killed more than 30 people.

An Israeli military source said Sawalha was killed after he threw grenades at troops who came to arrest him in Jenin. Palestinian hospital officials confirmed his death.

Witnesses said scores of Israeli forces had entered the city, some of them proceeding from house to house, breaking down walls and dynamiting doors until they found Sawalha holed up with his wife in a cave dug under one building.

Soldiers called for him to surrender, but he only sent his wife out of the house and then faced the troops, they said.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat branded the killing a “crime” and the Islamic Jihad vowed to avenge Sawalha’s death.

“This operation and crime will not break our strength and our resistance and our jihad will continue,” Sheikh Abdallah Shami, an Islamic Jihad leader in the Gaza Strip, said.

“The Islamic Jihad will respond to this crime and our strike will be even more painful,” he said.

The Islamic Jihad has been behind a series of suicide and car bombings inside Israel since the uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip flared two years ago.

Last month, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on a commuter bus in northern Israel that killed 14 people.

Israeli sources alleged Sawalha planned that bombing, as well as another attack in June that killed 17 people.

US ENVOY EXPECTED NEXT WEEK: US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield is due in the region on Monday to push a “roadmap” for peace which calls for Palestinian reforms and Israeli withdrawals from West Bank cities reoccupied after a series of bombings.

In Cairo, officials from Arafat’s Fatah faction and the militant Islamic group Hamas were to meet to discuss ending tensions between them and halting suicide attacks in Israel.

The talks were scheduled for Saturday, but a Fatah official in the West Bank said they would be delayed to Sunday.

On Friday, Palestinian officials said they would formally respond to the U.S.-sponsored “roadmap” to peace before Satterfield’s visit, but Israelis indicated their response would be delayed due to the collapse of their coalition government.

Israeli government sources expected “very little movement” on the plan until the right-wing Likud party of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon chose a leader to run in a January election.

Sharon opted for a national ballot nine months early after key coalition partner, the centre-left Labour Party, bolted his 20-month-old government over funding for Jewish settlements in territories the Palestinians want for a state.—Reuters