Israelis Kill 3 Palestinian Militants in West Bank Raid

Israeli troops killed three Palestinian militants Thursday during an arrest raid in the West Bank, and Israel later threatened stepped-up measures to quell rocket fire from the Gaza Strip after a salvo wounded five of its soldiers.

Security officials said one of the fighters killed in the city of Nablus commanded a local militia affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Israeli officials said Bashar Hanani, 29, had orchestrated a suicide bombing at an open-air market in Tel Aviv last year that killed three Israelis and injured 40 others.

Since then, Hanani had been behind several thwarted attacks and was planning a new suicide bombing, Israeli officials said. The military said troops opened fire after they were shot at. The other two fighters killed in the exchange were aides to Hanani, the military said.

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip later fired rockets into southern Israel, which fell near an industrial area south of the city of Ashkelon and at an Israeli army base just north of Gaza. Five soldiers suffered minor injuries when a projectile hit near a mess hall where troops were eating.

The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility, saying the attacks were in retaliation for the Nablus deaths and other instances of what it called Israeli aggression.

Israel answered with renewed barrages of artillery fire into fields from which militants have launched their crude rockets. One shell killed a 21-year-old Palestinian man in northern Gaza, Palestinian medics said. But Israeli military officials said they believed no one was in the area.

The back-and-forth violence has ramped up since Dec. 5, when an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber from the West Bank killed five Israelis at a shopping mall. Since then, the military has carried out numerous raids against Islamic Jihad in the West Bank and launched airstrikes in the Gaza Strip that have killed half a dozen militants allegedly involved in the rocket attacks or other violence.

Palestinian guerrillas have kept up rocket attacks despite the reprisals. One attack struck near an Israeli power plant about four miles north of the Gaza Strip. Militants now find it easier to strike areas that were once out of range because they can launch from sites in northern Gaza evacuated by Israeli forces during the summer. Israeli analysts also are concerned that fighters are trying to extend the range of the rockets.

The cross-border salvos prompted Israeli officials Thursday to threaten new, unspecified measures against the rocket fire. Israeli leaders say the Palestinian Authority has done too little to curb the attacks.

“The missiles were launched from territory that Israel has already evacuated,” said David Baker, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. “Israel has no other choice but to respond, including steps that we haven’t taken until now.” He did not elaborate.

Some Israeli hard-liners have advocated sending ground troops into Gaza for the first time since Israel evacuated all 21 Jewish settlements there and withdrew soldiers during the late summer, ending a 38-year occupation.

But analysts said Sharon was unlikely to do so at this time out of concern that an incursion would lend weight to critics’ charges that the withdrawal had made Israel less safe.

Sharon, who pushed for the pullout from Gaza and a small chunk of the northern West Bank, is seeking reelection as head of a new centrist movement, Kadima, or Forward. Elections are set for March 28.

In other developments, officials in Fatah, the dominant Palestinian political group, said they had reached agreement with a breakaway faction that would allow the two to form a single candidate list ahead of parliamentary elections planned for Jan. 25. The party once led by Yasser Arafat has been riven by internal strife, underscored when a group of younger Fatah members announced its own slate last week in defiance of the leadership.

Under the tentative agreement, officials said, the unified Fatah list would be headed by imprisoned uprising leader Marwan Barghouti, who is allied with the young guard. But Fatah must first get permission from the Palestinian elections commission to submit a new, unified list. The registration deadline was Dec. 14.

Times special correspondent Maher Abukhater in the West Bank city of Ramallah contributed to this report.