GAZA, 26 December — Two gunmen and an Israeli soldier were killed on Israel’s border with Jordan yesterday. The fighting followed an ambush of an Israeli patrol. No group claimed responsibility for the attack.
Describing the attack about 15 km (nine miles) north of the West Bank, an Israeli Army officer said the commander of the patrol and a tracker were shot and wounded in the initial gunfire near the border fence in a farming area. "We got a search party together and went in there to flush out the terrorists," he told Israel radio. A soldier was killed and two others were wounded in an ensuing battle, the army said, adding that the bodies of two "armed men" were later found just inside Israel.
Security sources first reported that Israeli forces had entered Jordan in pursuit of the gunmen but later said troops crossed the frontier fence — short of the actual border — without leaving Israeli territory. Jordanian Minister of State Saleh Qallab also denied earlier reports Israeli forces had crossed the border and said there was no proof the infiltrators had come from Jordan.
Meanwhile, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat accused Israel of "continuing aggression" after tanks and helicopters swept into the Palestinian-ruled West Bank village of Tammon and arrested several Palestinians.
The Palestinian leadership decided after a three-hour meeting to push ahead with high-level contacts with Israel, despite the Jewish state’s ban on Arafat attending a Christmas service in Bethlehem. Nabil Abu Rudeina said the leadership decided that ongoing talks between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian parliamentary Speaker Ahmed Qorei were "a very important political contact" that should not be broken.
Meanwhile, a Jewish religious school expressed regret for publicly burning a copy of the New Testament, saying it was just trying to protect its students from efforts to convert them to Christianity. A spokeswoman for Orot, a school in town of Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem, said a teacher held the outdoor book-burning for his sixth-grade class in early December, destroying a Bible a missionary gave to a pupil.
