MIDDLE EAST: Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire outside an Israeli army base in the southern town of Beersheba yesterday afternoon, killing two female soldiers at an adjacent restaurant and injuring four Israeli civilians, one of them critically.
Soldiers and policemen shot dead the gunmen, one of whom had run toward a nearby school and was found to be wearing explosives on a belt around his waist.
Israel in response to the Palestinian attack fired missiles at a Palestinian Authority police installation in Gaza City last night; first reports said 10 Palestinians were injured.
The violence wsa the climax of two days of heavy Intifada attacks: on Saturday night, an elderly Israeli woman was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen in a drive-by shooting in the West Bank near Nablus. Before dawn yesterday, Israel sent troops into parts of Nablus, in what one officer said was a failed hunt for those gunmen and for others involved in an attack on a settlement last week in which three Israelis were killed.
In exchanges of fire between the troops and local gunmen, several Palestinians were injured, two of them critically. Palestinian officials said a resident of Nablus's Askar refugee camp died of a heart attack following the army's incursion; there were unconfirmed reports of a second fatality.
Also yesterday, Israeli police officials said that one of their bullets killed a Palestinian teenager who allegedly participated in the stabbing to death of a 25-year-old Israeli woman, Moran Amit, in south Jerusalem's Forest of Peace on Friday afternoon. The family of the dead boy, Samer Abu-Maila, 14, claimed that police beat him to death; the police officials, who initially said Abu-Maila had collapsed unaccountably, said he was hit by gunfire when they chased him and the other alleged attackers through the forest and that the bullet wound was only spotted during an autopsy.
Yesterday's Beersheba attack, for which Hamas claimed responsibility, came as Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, returned from talks in Washington with President Bush, at which the US pledged to continue to pressure Mr Yasser Arafat into "cracking down on terrorism" but rebuffed Mr Sharon's call for a personal boycott of the Palestinian leader. Ominously, for the first time yesterday, Hamas fired two Kassam missiles into southern Israel. No one was hurt.
Israeli F-16 warplanes bombed Mr Arafat's Gaza City compound late yesterday, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East, Mr Terje Roed-Larsen, said in a statement.
The strikes also caused serious damage to a UN building. He expressed "outrage". - (AFP)