RAMALLAH, March 13 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - An Italian news photographer died Wednesday morning after being seriously wounded by Israeli occupation army gunfire in Ramallah in the West Bank, hospital sources said.

Raffaele Ciriello, a freelancer, is the first journalist killed since the Palestinian Intifada against Israeli occupation broke out in September 2000. More than 1,500 people, mostly Palestinians, have been killed during this period. 

Ciriello was hit in the chest and stomach by six bullets fired from an Israeli tank, hospital sources said.

More than 30 foreign and Palestinian journalists came under heavy Israeli machine-gun fire Tuesday, March 12, while filming an Israel army incursion into the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Journalists present at the scene told Agence France-Presse (AFP) they had gathered on a hotel balcony overlooking the Al-Amari refugee camp when they came under fire from a tank-mounted heavy machine gun as they were either filming or taking pictures of the Israeli raid.

The intensive 15-minute assault smashed a glass balcony and several windows at the Palace Inn Hotel, besides piercing walls of rooms where other journalists were working. No one was injured.

Journalists fled to hide in the hotel's corridors. One journalist then called an Israeli army spokesman, informing him of the situation.

The spokesman reportedly apologized for the incident, claiming the occupation army had mistaken the journalists for Palestinian snipers and their cameras for weapons.

Earlier, three Palestinians were killed by Israeli tank fire in Ramallah, two of them in the central Al-Manara district, Palestinian security sources said.

One civilian was killed after Israeli tank shells hit his car in the Beitunya district, while the other two were "cut to pieces" in Al-Manara, security sources said.

The latest deaths bring to 1,518 the number of people killed during the almost a-year-and-a-half Palestinian Intifada, including 1,172 Palestinians and 339 Israelis.

Meanwhile, the deputy commander of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Force 17 bodyguard in Ramallah was killed Wednesday, March 13, during a gun fight with Israeli occupation troops in the center of the West Bank city, one security source said.

Abu-Fadih, a Force 17 colonel, served as deputy to Mahmoud Dumah Abu Awad. He was killed near Marara place in the center of the city, which was almost entirely occupied by Israeli forces Tuesday.

Israeli public radio said Abu-Fadih was considered by the Israeli government to be the head of a cell in the Tanzim -- an armed group attached to Arafat's Fatah movement -- responsible for the deaths of at least 15 Israelis.

On Tuesday, nearly 40 people died in the biggest Israeli army offensive in years, ahead of a U.S. mission to halt the relentless bloodletting. Palestinian resistance activists hit back in northern Israel in retaliation.

With former U.S general Anthony Zinni due in the region Thursday, March 14, the Israeli army occupied most of the West Bank City of Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority's capital, killing five Palestinians.

The invasion came on the heels of an overnight battle in a Gaza Strip refugee camp that left 17 Palestinians dead. Another eight Palestinians were killed in scattered violence around the West Bank and Gaza.

In another development, Arafat dismissed the Israeli decision to allow him to move about the Palestinian territories after being penned in the town for more than three months.

Speaking to Qatar’s satellite broadcast Al-Jazeera television, Arafat said that his predicament was "contrary to international conventions and diplomatic norms."

The decision "to allow me to leave Ramallah is insolent. As if I needed to wait for authorization," Arafat told Al-Jazeera.

"What is needed is to lift the blockade imposed on our people, to halt the aggression, the oppression, the racism and the Nazism against our people," said Arafat.

Meanwhile in Cairo and the Nile Delta, Egyptian university students staged new anti-Israeli demonstrations Tuesday, amid escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence. Witnesses said around 2,000 students, gathered at the University of Cairo, chanted: "With our blood and soul, we will sacrifice for you, Oh Palestine."

Riot police were deployed en masse in the area to ensure calm and that students stayed on campus, which is only several hundred meters (yards) from the Israeli embassy.

Approximately 1,500 students also demonstrated at a branch of the University of Tanta in the Nile Delta town of Kafr al-Sheikh, police sources said, adding there were no incidents or arrests.

Demonstrators shouted: "Come to Jihad, to victory or to martyrdom," and called for the expulsion of the U.S. and Israeli ambassadors from Arab countries and the boycott of "Jewish and American" products, according to a fax sent by organizers to AFP.

Anti-Israeli demonstrations have been regularly held at universities and schools in Egypt since the beginning of the uprising, or Intifada, in the occupied Palestinian territories in September 2000.