| Six palestinians and israeli officer killed in clashes Original Source Link: (May no longer be active) http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5595989http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5595989
Six Palestinians, Israeli Officer Killed in Clashes Tue Jul 6, 2004 07:38 AM ET
By Atef Sa'ad NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) - The Israeli army shot dead six Palestinians on Tuesday and an Israeli special forces officer was killed in a gunfight during a raid on Palestinian militants, witnesses and military sources said.
Violence in an almost four-year-old Palestinian revolt is sputtering on in the extended run-up to Israel's planned 2005 evacuation of all Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and some from the West Bank.
Israeli army commandos raided a residential building in the Ein Beit-Ilma refugee camp in the city of Nablus before dawn, killing two senior members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), residents and military sources said.
The Israeli army said special forces Lieutenant Moran Vardi, 25, was killed and three commandos wounded in exchanges of fire.
Residents said the commandos also shot and killed two neighbors -- a 50-year-old Palestinian academic and his 16-year-old son -- at the door of their apartment.
Israeli military sources said a militant who survived the initial gunfight had taken refuge in an adjacent flat.
Relatives of Khaled Salah, an engineering professor at Nablus's al-Najah University, told Reuters that troops who rang the bell on his apartment door shot him as soon as he opened it and then fired at his son, who was standing behind him.
"They killed them in cold blood. I went to my brother's apartment and saw some 50 bullet holes...," said Salah Salah, a brother of the academic.
Palestinian security sources identified the dead militants as Yaman Faraj, the PFLP's West Bank commander, and a deputy.
Residents in Nablus, the main urban stronghold of West Bank militant groups, said Israeli forces later dynamited the PFLP militants' hideout in Ein Beit-Ilma.
TWO MILITANTS KILLED ATTACKING ARMY POST
In Gaza, Israeli troops killed two Palestinian militants who tried to attack their guardpost on the Kissufim road leading to the boundary with Israel, military sources said.
They said the gunmen crept to within about 20 yards of the post before opening fire with automatic rifles and grenades.
Soldiers backed by tanks and helicopters also entered the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza in another in a series of searches for tunnels used to smuggle in weapons from nearby Egypt.
Rafah residents said troops were flattening abandoned shops in one neighborhood. Medics said two Palestinians were lightly wounded by gunfire into the camp.
In May, 42 Palestinians were killed in a massive Israeli incursion into Rafah after Islamic militants blew up 13 Israeli soldiers in ambushes on their troop carriers.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intends to uproot all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza by the end of next year and four of 120 in the West Bank in a plan for "disengagement" from what has become a conflict of attrition with the Palestinians.
Polls show most Israelis back the initiative to shift the 7,500 Jews in Gaza, who live alongside 1.3 million Palestinians. But ultra-rightist Gaza settlers vow to resist removal from territories Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
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