Israel's seizure of a radical Palestinian leader pushed interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert further ahead in opinion polls published today ahead of a March 28 election.
In fresh violence in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli soldier involved in a raid in which the army said five militants were captured in the city of Jenin. Gunmen elsewhere in the West Bank wounded two Israeli motorists.
Pointing to a "Jericho effect", a survey on Army Radio gave Olmert's front-running Kadima party 43 seats in the 120-member parliament, a six-seat jump which the poll attributed to public support for Tuesday's raid on a jail in the West Bank city.
"This effect, in my opinion, will wear off over the next day or two," Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud party which is struggling in third place, told Army Radio.
Polls published in newspapers on Thursday predicted a smaller rise, to 38 or 39 seats, for centrist Kadima following the day-long assault when Israeli forces seized Ahmed Saadat, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Support for Kadima had slipped slightly in recent weeks after a sympathy surge that followed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke on Jan. 4, which left him in a coma.
According to the new polls, the centre-left Labour Party and Likud were showing no sign of gaining momentum ahead of election day. Both parties remained relatively stable with about 19 seats for Labour and 15 for Likud.
The Jericho raid, following the pullout of foreign monitors supervising Saadat's incarceration under a 2002 deal that ended an Israeli siege of Yasser Arafat's West Bank compound, was widely seen as having burnished Olmert's security credentials.
Israel accuses Saadat of ordering the 2001 assassination of Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi. The PFLP said it killed Zeevi to avenge Israel's killing of one of its leaders.
Saadat's lawyer, who met the PFLP leader at an Israeli detention centre in Jerusalem, said his client denied the allegations.
Attorney Mahmoud Hassan quoted Saadat as saying: "I told the interrogators I do not recognise any interrogation. This is illegal. I rejected my presence in their jails as illegal."
The PFLP and the Islamic militant group Hamas, winner of the Jan. 25 Palestinian election and which is forming a new government, have vowed to take revenge for the prison raid.