MIDDLE EAST: A car bomb exploded between two Israeli army checkpoints on a busy transit route outside Jerusalem yesterday, killing two Palestinians and wounding 16 people in the first such attack for six months.
Militants within Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement claimed responsibility and apologised for the Palestinian casualties, saying their target was soldiers.
The attack raised the prospect of a fierce Israeli army response likely to focus on the nearest West Bank city of Ramallah, Mr Arafat's headquarters and the territory's political and commercial centre.
A car rigged with explosives blew up when Israeli border police approached it during a search after a security alert was declared, police said.
The explosion occurred between the West Bank checkpoints of Qalandiya and A-Ram on a main road between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
Medics said two Palestinians were killed, including a 56-year-old man at the wheel of his car, and 13 were wounded including the man's four-year-old nephew, who was in critical condition. Three Israeli border police were seriously wounded.
Some of the Palestinians were residents of Israel.
Israel Radio initially said the attack seemed to be the work of a suicide bomber, but police found no evidence of that.
Zekariya Zubeidi, commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, said militants in the group had brought a car packed with explosives but without a suicide bomber to the high-security Qalandiya area.
"We consider the Palestinians killed to be martyrs. The target was the checkpoints. We are sorry for the casualties on our own side," he said.
Palestinian militants have carried out scores of suicide and ambush attacks on Israelis during an uprising launched almost four years ago in the West Bank and Gaza, territories Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
The bombing broke a lull in such attacks in the Jerusalem area since February, when a Palestinian suicide bomber killed eight people on a bus. Militant attacks inside Israel have abated this year for reasons including Israeli killings of many cell commanders in raids, better intelligence tip-offs used to intercept militants and Israel's partly built security wall.
But violence has surged in parts of the territories, especially Gaza, where militants seek to portray Israel's plan to evacuate Jewish settlers in 2005 as a victory. Israel is bent on preventing that by smashing Palestinian armed factions first.
In pre-dawn violence in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli helicopter fired a missile into the Khan Younis refugee camp, wounding 15 people as gunmen confronted an Israeli force demolishing Palestinian homes near a Jewish settlement. An Israeli military source said the army was carrying out an operation against militants in Khan Younis and the helicopter had fired at an "open area" to repulse armed men.