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West Bank Settlement Resistance Operation Kills Two, Injures 30
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Israeli police investigate the scene of the martyr operation |
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, Feb. 17 (News Agencies) - A Palestinian resistance operation killed two Israelis and injured 30 people Saturday in a shopping center in a West Bank Jewish settlement, news agencies reported.
The blast came right after an assassination of a Hamas resistance activist carried out by the Israeli occupation army in the West Bank town of Jenin.
Fresh efforts being conducted in Egypt to find a ceasefire have been dampened by the escalating unrest, which overnight also saw Palestinian gunmen shoot an Israeli soldier at a West Bank roadblock and the Israeli army kill three Palestinians in raids into the Gaza Strip.
Two Israeli women were killed and thirty injured five seriously, in the martyr operation at a shopping mall in the West Bank settlement of Karnei Shomron. Police established that a third body was that of the activist who carried out the operation AFP reported.
An anonymous man claiming to represent the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) claimed the bombing in a phone call to AFP, saying it was "revenge for Israeli military incursions, siege, killing and bombardments."
He named the activist who carried out the operation as Sadek Abdel Hafed from the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya on the border with Israel.
But Israel blamed Yasser Arafat for the attack, charging that the Palestinian leader was "in collusion" with extremist groups with a "murderous appetite."
"For some time now Israel has been the victim of a relentless and murderous series of terrorist attacks aiming specifically at civilians, at men women and children," Israeli government spokesman Avi Pazner said, warning that Israel would do everything it can "to fight against this scourge."
On Saturday, the military wing of Hamas, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, fired one of its home-made Qassam 1 rockets at a military base in the northern Gaza Strip for the first time, but without causing casualties. Earlier, a more powerful Katyusha-type Qassam 2 rocket landed harmlessly near a kibbutz in southern Israel.
A Hamas activist on Israel's most wanted list, Nazeeh Abu Assubaam, was also blown up in a car explosion Jenin, where Israel has carried out a number of assassination.
Three passers-by, including a two-year-old boy, were wounded in the blast which Palestinian witnesses said they believed was triggered by remote control by an overflying Israeli plane.
Earlier Saturday, the Israeli army was still retaliating for an attack in the Gaza Strip which destroyed one of its most sophisticated tanks and marked one of its most damaging setbacks of the conflict.
In Gaza, a Palestinian died at dawn Sunday of bullet wounds sustained during clashes with the Israeli army on the Gaza Strip, hospital sources said.
Lotfi Saqr, 25, had been critically wounded in the chest during the clashes in the Boureij refugee camp on Saturday.
His death brings to 1,217 the number of people killed since the September 2000 outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada, including 930 Palestinians (mostly children and teenagers) and 265 Israelis.
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