Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinians today and wounded two other people in confrontations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, witnesses said.
An army spokeswoman said two suspected gunmen near the West Bank town of Bethlehem were shot and killed when they resisted arrest and shot at troops. In Gaza, the spokesman said, troops shot at two Palestinians in a no-go area by a security fence.
Palestinian medics said they had found the body of a gunman in Gaza from the Islamic Jihad group, north of the Karni commercial crossing between the coastal strip and Israel.
Two other Palestinians were wounded, they said. Islamic Jihad is a Palestinian militant group sworn to Israel's destruction that has carried out rocket attacks and suicide bombings against the Jewish state.
Violence has continued in the West Bank and Gaza Strip while Israel has also been fighting Hizbullah guerrillas. A five-day-old ceasefire in the war in Lebanon has largely held.
Three Palestinian militants from the armed wing of the governing Hamas Islamist group died in the West Bank city of Jenin on Friday while they were preparing a bomb, local security officials said.
The Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades described the men as engineers, the term it uses for bomb-makers.
Earlier, an Israeli air strike destroyed a building in the Gaza Strip where the army said militants were making rockets, wounding at least one. An Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip aims to recover a captured soldier and put a stop to cross-border rocket fire.
Nearly 180 Palestinians, about half of them militants, have been killed.