- GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli
missile strike killed a Palestinian bomb-making expert in Gaza and gunmen
killed two Israeli soldiers in the West Bank on Thursday in a surge of
violence ahead of an anticipated U.S.-led peace drive.
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- Israel said it hoped the fall of Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein would chasten Palestinian militants into laying down their arms.
But militant groups spearheading a 30-month-old revolt said they would
not be cowed by the U.S. conquest of Baghdad and threatened to intensify
attacks in Israel.
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- Israeli security sources said the man killed by helicopter
gunship fire was Mahmoud al-Zatma, accused by Israel of preparing explosives
for suicide attacks carried out by the Islamic Jihad militant group.
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- The missiles hit al-Zatma, allegedly behind a 1995 suicide
bombing that killed 22 Israelis, as he drove through a Gaza City neighborhood
and left his car a mangled wreck. Ten Palestinians were wounded in the
strike, medics said.
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- The army said that in Thursday's predawn attack in the
West Bank, gunmen cut through a fence around an army base in the Jordan
Valley and opened fire at a tent housing soldiers, killing two and wounding
nine before being shot dead.
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- Violence in the Palestinian uprising for independence
had tapered off since the Iraq war began on March 20, but fighting has
been on the rise this week. Israeli strikes and raids have killed 13 Palestinians
in Gaza in three days.
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- The bloodshed runs counter to Washington's calls for
calm before it introduces a long-delayed program for Middle East peacemaking
in the aftermath of the war in Iraq.
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- President Bush has said he will present a peace "road
map" leading to a Palestinian state by 2005, once Palestinian lawmakers
confirm a new reformist cabinet under prime minister-designate Mahmoud
Abbas, a leading moderate.
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- Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat condemned the
killings of Palestinians and accused Israel of trying to sabotage the peace
effort.
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- ISRAEL TELLS PALESTINIANS TO HEED IRAQ
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- Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz hammered home his
government's wish that the U.S. conquest of Iraq would teach Palestinians
the lesson that they must abandon their uprising and install new leaders.
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- "I hope that in the era after the toppling of Saddam
Hussein's regime, the Palestinians will understand that the world has changed,"
Mofaz told reporters.
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- Palestinians must "give the chance for a new and
authentic leadership to grow, end terror and incitement and return to the
negotiating table," he said.
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- Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, senior political leader of the
Islamic militant group Hamas, pledged "resistance will escalate and
will become more violent."
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- Islamic Jihad official Mohammed al-Hindi accused Israel
of trying to exploit the Iraq war to crush the uprising.
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- "The result of this new assassination will be resistance
and response," he told Reuters in Gaza after al-Zatma's death.
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- The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the missile
strike. Israel has tracked and killed dozens of militants during the uprising.
Palestinians call the practice state-sponsored assassination and Israel
calls it self-defense .
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- An anonymous caller to Reuters claimed responsibility
for the West Bank attack in the name of the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian
President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction.
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- Elsewhere in the West Bank, an Israeli army unit on a
raid exchanged fire with Palestinian gunmen in the town of Tulkarm, killing
one and wounding four, an Israeli military source said.
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- The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank town of
Salfit said they had shot dead a 65-year-old Palestinian land broker suspected
of collaborating with Israel.
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- Palestinians have killed dozens of their brethren accused
of helping Israeli forces track and kill Palestinian militants.
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- At least 1,987 Palestinians and 729 Israelis have been
killed since the uprising flared in September 2000 after negotiations on
a Palestinian state froze.
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