Israeli troops shot and killed at least four Palestinian people, including three children in a West Bank market today after Palestinians mistakenly thought a curfew had been lifted.
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An Israeli medic stands by the covered bodies of settlers, killed in the Israeli settlement of Itamar near the West Bank town of Nablus. Palestinian gunmen killed six Israelis, including a mother and her three children, when they attacked the West Bank Jewish settlement of Itamar on Thursday.
REUTERS |
Dozens more people were said to have been injured when Israeli troops opened fire in the market in Jenin. The violence follows the reoccupation of the major West Bank cities in retaliation for three Palestinian attacks on Israelis in successive days.
Early this morning Israeli tanks rolled into the West Bank city of Nablus, just hours after Palestinian gunmen killed five Israelis in an attack on a house filled with children in a nearby Jewish settlement.
The incursion, involving dozens of tanks and armored vehicles, appeared to be the broadest Israeli response yet to a new wave of Palestinian attacks, including two suicide bombings in Jerusalem which killed 26 people.
The attacks have prompted the US to hold off on a key policy statement outlining its view of the road to Palestinian statehood.
The Israeli army said in a statement that the toll in the Itamar settlement attack was five - a mother, three of her children and a settler security guard. Ambulance service workers had said yesterday that six people were killed.
"The terrorist climbed a fence, entered one of the houses and opened fire at its residents," the army statement said.
Two of the other children in the house, which burned down after a bullet ignited a gas canister, were wounded.
Political sources said Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon would convene his security cabinet today to discuss a possible further call-up of army reservists and a widening of Israeli military operations in the West Bank.
Palestinian witnesses and security officials said Israeli troops entered Nablus from three directions. Soldiers announced over loudspeakers that a curfew had been imposed and troops sporadically opened fire, the witnesses said.
"We are in the middle of a war, a hard war, a cruel war, a war that the Palestinian terrorists are carrying out against women and children and old people," Mr Sharon told a meeting of Jewish leaders shortly after the Itamar attack began to unfold last night.