NABLUS, West Bank, 16 April 2003 — An Israeli Army shoot-out in Nablus cost the lives of a Palestinian militant chief and an Israeli Army officer yesterday, while two Israeli civilian workers were slain by a Palestinian who went on a shooting spree on the Gaza border before being gunned down.
Another Palestinian man was also killed by Israeli tank fire in the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian leader Mazen Freitkh, 24, was killed by Israeli soldiers who attacked the house where he was hiding out, Israeli Army and Palestinian sources said, adding he was a local leader of the Hamas group.
But the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party, claimed Freitkh for their own.
Israeli Lt. Daniel Mandel, 24, was killed in the same incident, an army spokesman said, while two soldiers in his unit were wounded, one seriously.
The army nabbed the other two who were identified as fighters.
Two Palestinian civilians were also wounded as fierce clashes broke out between the army and Palestinian gunmen, Palestinian sources said, adding the army had carried out house-to-house searches, blowing out doors and rounding up residents in the area.
Also in Nablus, the local leader of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the military branch of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Kamil Abu Hnesh, 26, was arrested by the Israeli Army in a separate incident.
On the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian gunman killed two Israeli civilians when he ran amok at the Karni crossing point before Israeli forces shot him dead, Israeli security sources said.
The Palestinian broke into the transport terminal, where goods and humanitarian aid are transferred, and started shooting with an automatic rifle and throwing grenades before soldiers manning the border post killed him, the sources said.
One Israeli was also wounded in the attack.
Overnight, another Palestinian man was killed by Israeli tank fire in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
Abu Al-Hamid Abu Al-Aish, 32, was killed in the Tel Al-Sultan district of the city, the sources said without elaborating on the circumstances.
Hard by the Israeli-controlled border with Egypt, Rafah has been a continual flashpoint of the 30-month-old Palestinian uprising as the army has sought to prevent arms smuggling across the frontier.
The six deaths brought to 3,159 the number of people killed in the Palestinian uprising.
A possible Palestinian attack was foiled by the army late Monday, when a carload of ammunition was seized and the driver arrested near the southern West Bank town of Hebron.
Soldiers stopped the car at a road block near the town and arrested the driver when they found an illegal consignment of some 5,000 bullets for the Kalashnikov and M-16 assault rifles used by Palestinian fighters. A military source said the arms trafficker was an Arab Israeli. Despite the appointment of a new moderate Palestinian prime minister, Mahmud Abbas, violence has continued in recent weeks.
On Monday, the local Jenin branch leader of Fatah party, which Abbas helped found four decades ago, issued a statement vowing to pursue “heroic operations” against Israel. “Despite all those wounded and despite Israeli continuous strikes, the resistance is alive,” the Fatah statement said.
