Palestinian Killed Near West Bank Settlement

Israeli troops killed one Palestinian and wounded another Monday as the two were planting a bomb along a road in the West Bank.

The two Palestinians were planting the device on a West Bank road near the Shavei Shomron settlement when Israeli soldiers opened fire on them, both sides agreed. The two were members of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.

Earlier Monday, three Israelis were wounded in a drive-by shooting outside Shavei Shomron, the military and doctors said. One was the settlement rabbi, who was slightly injured. A father and daughter in the cab were seriously injured.

Late Sunday, the Israeli army killed two armed Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian security officials identified the two men as policemen and said Israel had killed them in cold blood. The army said they were gunmen shot dead as they embarked on an attack on a Jewish settlement.

During the incident, which included an Israeli incursion into the town of Beit Lahia, a private American school with a U.S. flag flying over the building was damaged by tank shells and machine-gun fire, witnesses said.

The army denied that it had fired in the area. The school’s students are children of well-to-do Palestinians and foreign workers in Gaza.

In a separate operation, Israeli special forces raided a house in Gaza City and abducted a veteran leader of the radical Islamic movement Hamas, Abed Rabbo Abu Houssa, 45. The Israeli military suspects him of masterminding the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers who disappeared in 1989.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces remained at the outskirts of the West Bank town of Jenin, the last of six towns and cities the military entered last month.