NABLUS, September 17 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Few hours after the U.S. vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli threats to expel Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, Israeli occupation forces stormed Wednesday, September 17, Casbah, the old city of Nablus, and killed a Palestinian activist in cold blood.

Eyewitnesses told IslamOnline.net that Israeli soldiers broke into several houses in the West bank town, triggering a shootout with Palestinian resistance fighters.

Identifying the new martyr as Fadi Abu Zant, a 17-year-old member of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the witnesses said Israeli soldiers shot him in the leg and then showered him with bullets while bleeding on the ground.

His death brings to 3,481 the number of people who have been killed since the start of the Palestinian Intifada against Israeli occupation in September 2000, including 2,599 Palestinians and 819 Israelis.

Three Israeli settlers, arrested last year as they were planting a bomb next to a Palestinian school in occupied east Jerusalem, were convicted Wednesday of attempted homicide, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The three, from the Bat Ayin settlement near the southern West Bank town of Bethlehem, had tried to park an explosive-laden pick-up truck between a hospital and a girls' school in the Attur neighborhood in April 2002.

The court judged that the settlers, caught red handed, had planned to perpetrate a "mass killing" in retaliation to anti-Israeli attacks, judiciary sources said.

Yarden Morag, Shlomo Dvir and Ofer Gamliel, have been in custody since the botched attack. They will be sentenced at a later date.

Nine other settlers suspected of belonging to an anti-Arab terrorist network were released earlier this month over a lack of evidence, with some of them placed under house arrest.