Israeli soldiers capture two Palestinians during an attack on Nablus

Additional Reporting By Mustafa el-Sawaf, Samer Khuwayera, IOL Palestine Correspondents

NABLUS, West Bank, April 15 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – An Israeli army shoot-out in this West Bank city cost the lives of a Palestinian and an Israeli army officer Tuesday, April 15, while two Israeli workers were killed by a Palestinian who went on a shooting spree on the Gaza border before being gunned down.

Another Palestinian man was also killed by Israeli tank fire in the Gaza Strip.

Mazen Freitkh, 24, was killed by Israeli soldiers who attacked the house where he was hiding out, Israeli army and Palestinian sources said, adding he was a local leader of the Islamic resistance Hamas.

But the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, claimed Freitkh for their own.

Israeli Lieutenant Daniel Mandel, 24, was killed in the same incident, an army spokesman said, while two soldiers in his unit were wounded, one seriously.

Two Palestinian civilians were also wounded as fierce clashes broke out between the Israeli occupation forces and Palestinian gunmen, Palestinian sources said, adding the army had carried out house-to-house searches, blowing out doors and rounding up residents in the area.

Israeli tanks backed by Apache helicopter gunships pushed into western Nablus and laid siege to a number of blocks and asked their inhabitants out, eyewitnesses told IslamOnline.net.

The occupation forces then arrested dozens of then and used others as human shields in a fierce five-hour shoot-out. The Apaches overhead launched missile strikes on the blocks, causing panic among the local inhabitants seeing palls of fire billowing ahead, the witnesses added.

Also in Nablus, the local leader of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the military branch of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Kamil Abu Hnesh, 26, was captured by the army in a separate incident.

Gaza Shooting

Two other Israelis were killed by a Palestinian who ran amok at a crossing point between Israel and Gaza Tuesday, April 15, an Israeli army spokeswoman said.

The two were civilian employees of the transport terminal at Karni, the main crossing point for commercial goods and humanitarian aid between Israel and the Gaza Strip, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

The spokeswoman said at least one other Israeli was injured in the shooting for which the Islamic resistance movement Hamas claimed responsibility.

Mohamed Mohamed Younis, 18, a member of the group from the Jabalayaa refugee camp managed to stealth into the electrified fence near the Karni crossing and opened random automatic gunfire and throw hand grenades at an Israeli military vehicle passing by, Hamas sources told IslamOnine.net.

Overnight, another Palestinian man was killed by Israeli tank fire in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

Abu al-Hamid Abu al-Aish, 32, was killed in the Tel al-Sultan district of the city, the sources said without elaborating on the circumstances.

Hard by the Israeli-controlled border with Egypt, Rafah has been a continual flashpoint of the 30-month-old Palestinian Intifadah as the army has sought to prevent alleged arms smuggling across the frontier.

The six deaths brought to 3,159 the number of people killed in the Palestinian uprising, including 2,377 Palestinians and 724 Israelis.

A possible Palestinian attack was foiled by the army late Monday, when a carload of ammunition was seized and the driver arrested near the southern West Bank town of Al-Khalil (Hebron).

Soldiers stopped the car at a road block near the town and arrested the driver when they found an illegal consignment of some 5,000 bullets for the Kalashnikov and M-16 assault rifles used by Palestinian militants.

A military source said the arms trafficker was an Arab Israeli.

On Monday, the local Jenin branch of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, which Abbas helped found four decades ago, issued a statement vowing to pursue "heroic operations" against Israel.

"Despite all those wounded and despite Israeli continuous strikes, the resistance is alive," the Fatah statemen

On Monday, Israeli troops blew up the house of a Palestinian Fatah fighter militant who had carried an attack in Israel and captured 11 Palestinians elsewhere in the West Bank, according to sources from both sides.

Since August of last year, the Israeli army has blown up almost 200 homes belonging to Palestinians accused of carrying out attacks against Israel or against Israeli settlers or soldiers in the occupied territories.

Humanitarian groups denounce the practice of home destruction, which Israel says is aimed at dissuading such attacks, charging they constitute illegal collective punishment.

The army has also destroyed hundreds of houses alleged to have been built without permits or for "security reasons", mainly in the southern Gaza sector of Rafah.