Palestinian mourners carry the bodies of the two martyrs (AFP)

Additional reporting by Mustafa el-Sawwaf, IOL Correspondent

GAZA CITY, January 24 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in Gaza City Saturday, January 24, as a U.S. diplomatic team prepared for a trip to the region to try to repair the tattered Middle East peace roadmap.

The two Palestinians were shot dead in the eastern part of Gaza City, Palestinian security sources told IslamOnline.net.

They identified the victims as Ashraf el-Mabiad and Sameer el-Mabiad, in their twenties, adding arrangements were made with the Israeli side to transfer the bodies to Al-Shifaa Hospital in Gaza.

The two Palestinians were severely hurt with shots in the legs, head and other parts of their body.

IOL correspondent says the shooting incident remains unclear, but apparently the two – wearing military fatigues of resistance factions – were on their way to carry out an attack against the Israeli occupation forces.

No Palestinian resistance faction has declared the two killed were its members.

Israeli military sources, meanwhile, confirmed the incident in a border area close to the southern Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Oz.

"Israeli troops opened fire towards two Palestinians as they were less than 200 meters (yards) from a banned zone," a source told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"Binoculars were found near the bodies suggesting they were there to monitor army movements in preparation for an attack."

The deaths brought the number of people killed since the start of the Palestinian Intifada in September 2000 to 3,708, including 2,776 Palestinians and 865 Israelis, according to an AFP count.

"Peace Moves"

"Time is definitely running out for the two-state solution," Arafat warned

Meanwhile, another attempt to prod the two sides back toward the peace table was in the works.

Two U.S. officials, David Satterfield, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and John Wolf, chief of the U.S. team monitoring roadmap compliance, are heading to the region early next week, AFP reported.

Their agenda is still being prepared, an American diplomat in occupied Jerusalem told AFP, adding they are expected to meet with both Israeli and Palestinian officials.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, however, expressed fear that time was running out for a peace deal, blaming Israel's separation wall in the West Bank and mushrooming Jewish settlements for undermining prospects of a future Palestinian state.

"Time is definitely running out for the two-state solution," despite Palestinian commitments, since back in the 1980s, to accept the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the limits of national aspirations, Arafat said in interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper.

Arafat, branded by both the United States and Israel as the number-one obstacle to peace, has accused Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of refusing to comply with the demands of the roadmap, which foresees the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.

Israeli officials said Friday, January 23, that Sharon is likely to visit Washington in February ahead of an International Court of Justice hearing on the legality of the barrier, which cuts deep into Palestinian territory.

He is also likely to set out his "disengagement plan," Israeli media have said.

Sharon warned in December that if the Palestinians failed to meet their obligations under the roadmap, he would disengage from the peace process and impose new borders unilaterally.

But he is likely to be scolded by Bush, who has labeled the barrier a "problem," for the lack of progress in implementing the roadmap.

The Guardian also spoke with Hamas political leader Abdelaziz Rantissi and Islamic Jihad's Gaza spokesman Nafez Azzam, who said they would accept a Palestinian state as a "temporary solution" in exchange for a halt to their armed struggle.

Rantissi added, however, that his resistance group would offer no more comprehensive ceasefires without a full Israeli withdrawal.

He warned of "new methods of resistance and new weapons," even if the security barrier eventually encloses all Palestinian areas.

Rantissi defended "bombings" as a means to shift "the balance of suffering," saying the "number of Palestinian children killed by the Israelis in the past three years is almost as high as the total number of Israeli deaths."

"These operations have only one target - to deter the killing of our children and civilians. If they stop killing our civilians, we will stop... We do not have a cult of death, we have a cult of dignity."

Rantissi's rationale of the "bombings" coincided with a British Member of Parliament's weighing in on the same topic.

"While we are arguing about suicide bombers and whether we condone or understand them, I think we should say that we don't condone or understand the Israeli illegal occupation of Palestine since 1997," British MP Jenny Tonge has said.

She went further to assure she could have considered blowing herself up had she been Palestinian.

Her statements caused an uproar and bitter criticisms by Israel and pro-Jewish groups forced her Liberal Democrats Party to sack her from the party.