Posted on 02/06/2003 3:32:25 PM PST by krodriguesdc
Palestinian gunmen kill 2 Israeli soldiers in Nablus
JERUSALEM Two Palestinian gunmen attacked an Israeli Army post in the West Bank city of Nablus before dawn Thursday, killing an Israeli officer and a soldier before they were shot to death.
In what the police were treating as a terrorist incident, a police officer shot and killed an unidentified Arab man in northern Israel after he stabbed another officer, lightly wounding him, the police said.
In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces, apparently firing from helicopters, killed two 21-year-old nurses at a hospital for rehabilitating the disabled, Palestinian officials said. The shooting, which the army said it was investigating, occurred shortly before midnight Wednesday.
Against the backdrop of this violence, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon continued to maneuver to form a new governing coalition. He received a lift Thursday from a minor party, Israel B'Aliya, which signed an agreement to join forces in Parliament with Sharon's dominant Likud faction.
Israel B'Aliya, which is led by the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, caters to Israel's large population of Russian immigrants but fared poorly in elections last week.
With the addition of this party's two seats, Likud now controls a third of the Parliament, or 40 seats.
Sharon has about six weeks to form his new government. He says he wants to form a broad coalition of right and left, but Israel's Labor party has resisted his appeal, saying that Sharon will not restrain settlement growth or moderate other hawkish positions.
In the Nablus attack, the gunmen did not penetrate the fence surrounding the army outpost, the army said. Instead, one of the Palestinians opened fire through the fence, killing the two soldiers before troops fired back. Both Palestinians were then killed.
The army said that the attackers were armed with AK-47 submachine guns and grenades.
Two Palestinian factions claimed responsibility for the assault, describing it as a joint operation. They were the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is connected to Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The soldiers were identified as Second Lieutenant Amir Ben Aryeh, 21, and Staff Sergeant Idan Suzin, also 21. After a devastating suicide bombing in Jerusalem in June, Israeli forces took control of Nablus and most other West Bank cities, which by agreement are supposed to be under Palestinian authority.
Officials of the Wafa Hospital, on the eastern edge of Gaza City, said that a single bullet fired through a window late Wednesday killed the nurses, both of them men.
The army said that it was investigating the incident. It said that the only Israeli fire in the area was from helicopters, and that it was directed toward open fields. It described the fire as warning shots.
The nurses were identified as Abed Kareem Lubad and Omar Hassan. The army also said it was still investigating the death Wednesday of a 65-year-old woman, Kamla Said, who was crushed when Israeli forces demolished the family home of her stepson, a militant. She apparently did not hear the Israelis' warnings to evacuate, her family said.
The army said its soldiers had followed proper procedure, evacuating and searching the buildingbefore detonating their charge.
Near the Israeli-Arab town of Umm el Fahm on Thursday, officers of the border police stopped a man who was walking with a group of Palestinians and who aroused their suspicions, the police said. In what has become standard procedure, the police ordered the man to lift his shirt to demonstrate he was not wearing a bomb, the police said.
The man did not comply and, when an officer approached him, he stabbed the officer and attempted to take his gun, the police said. Another officer then shot and killed the man.
The man was not carrying identification and the police had not determined Thursday night who he was. But he was described as Arab, meaning he could have been a Palestinian or an Arab citizen of Israel.
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