NABLUS, April 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Despite international calls for a quick withdrawal from Palestinian areas, Israel's Cabinet ministers decided Wednesday, April 10, that the 13-day military offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank will continue.

The Cabinet ministers also said Israel's siege of the Church of the Nativity, one of Christianity's holiest shrines, would not end until more than 200 Palestinians holed up there for more than a week have surrendered.

This came after Israeli occupation troops were largely in control of the remains of the Old City of Nablus Wednesday after an overnight air and ground assault.

Rescue teams searching the ruins of destroyed buildings found 14 bodies in the rubble Wednesday, including that of a local political leader, Palestinian medics said, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

They said the area, hit by Israeli fighter-bombers and helicopters, was completely under Israeli control.

Among the dead found in the Al-Yasmina district of the city center were Ribhe Haddad, local leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Ahmed Hmidan, a colonel in the Palestinian national security service, the medics said.

U.S. made F-16 fighters, which fired at least 10 missiles, and Apache helicopters had strafed the Old City and the neighboring Balata and Askar refugee camps where Palestinians continued to resist. The raids were accompanied by cannon and machine-gun fire from the ground.

At least 60 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting in Nablus, the biggest city in the northern West Bank with a population of 180,000, according to local officials.

With the town under a strict curfew, ambulances were barred from entering to pick up the wounded, and bodies lay rotting in the streets cratered by missile blasts.

The fresh violence came as Israeli occupation troops launched several grenades near the besieged Nativity Church in Bethlehem in the West Bank, where some 200 Palestinians have sought refuge. Some civilians are also trapped in adjacent convents, in addition to some 30 Franciscan monks. Early Wednesday, a series of grenade explosions were heard.

Christian leaders called on Israel to leave Bethlehem and some church officials, including a Franciscan friar, angrily accused Israel of provoking the unprecedented violence around the shrine.

"We're being shelled and bombed and assassinated and killed. Our homes are being destroyed, our children traumatized. Our livelihoods, our institutions, our infrastructure totally demolished," said Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, CNN reported.