GAZA CITY, 30 April 2003 — Israeli forces killed four Palestinians, including two activist leaders, in helicopter and tank raids yesterday, as the army made a new drive against hardliners ahead of an expected US peace push.

Nidal Salamah, 33, a leader of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the armed wing of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was killed when two Israeli helicopters fired rockets at his car near the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis, a senior Palestinian security official said. Awni Salhan, who was in the same car, died of his injuries a few hours later.

At least six other people were injured in the strike, in which two rockets were fired by two Apache helicopters, the Palestinian official said. One of them, the driver of a donkey cart behind the targeted car, was seriously hurt.

In another incident near Khan Yunis, four farmers, two of them women, were injured when Israeli troops guarding a nearby Jewish settlement bloc opened fire, Palestinian officials said.

Earlier yesterday in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, two activists of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, were killed by Israeli tank fire, Palestinian security sources said.

Mahmud Salah, 28, was the group’s leader for the Bethlehem region, while Anan Jawarish, 26, was one of his lieutenants, the sources said. Israeli tanks surrounded Salah’s home in the village of Al-Khader before shelling and completely destroying it, killing both of them.

The killings of the three men, which mark a beefed-up campaign of hunting militant leaders by the army as a renewed US-led peace effort looms, were condemned by Arafat, speaking before a key Parliament session to pass a new reformist Cabinet.

“This escalation is aimed at the parliamentary session which today gives its confidence vote to the new Cabinet.

Israel is challenging this meeting through this criminal action,” he told reporters in Ramallah as the parliamentary session was about to start.

His senior aide Nabil Abu Rudeina also accused Israel of putting obstacles in the path of the new government.