A top bomb-maker from the Islamic group Hamas accused of orchestrating the deaths of more than 100 Israelis was shot dead along with one of his lieutenants by elite Israeli troops on Sunday.
”Mahannad Taher, head of Hamas in the northern West Bank was killed in Nablus,” the Israeli army said in a statement, confirming witnesses reports the men were gunned down by troops who surrounded his house.
The army identified Taher (26) as a top bomb-maker for the military wing of Hamas, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, and one of Israel’s most wanted men. It said he was known as the ”Engineer-4.”
”He was responsible for suicide attacks that killed more than 100 Israeli and left hundreds wounded, notably in a deadly attack on a bus in Jerusalem on June 18,” which killed 19 Israelis, the army said.
One of his lieutenants, Imad Darawsa, was killed at the same time in ”an exchange of fire,” it said, while a third militant from the Islamic militant group was seriously wounded and evacuated to a hospital.
At least 60 wanted Palestinian militants have been killed in so-called ”targeted” attacks since the start of the Palestinian intifada in September of 2000.
Israel says the strikes prevent further attacks on its people, although Palestinians say the extrajudicial killings fuel the violence which has claimed the lives of more than 2 000 people on both sides.
There was more violence earlier when a 20-year-old Palestinian was killed in the Dheishe refugee camp near the West Bank town of Bethlehem when soldiers fired on stone-throwers, according to Palestinian security sources.
Two Israelis were also slightly injured when a train ran over an explosive planted by suspected Palestinian militants in central Israel, police said.
The railroad blast occurred outside Lod station as the train, packed with 500 passengers, headed for Tel Aviv from Beersheba in the south.
It smashed windows on a carriage and slightly injured two passengers, with a third suffering from shock. A Palestinian suspect was detained for questioning, local police said.
The Israeli army is also still re-occupying seven of the eight main Palestinian towns and cities in the West Bank, with only Jericho spared, following a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings this month.
On Saturday the army blew up the Palestinian government and security headquarters in Hebron although they failed to find the bodies of 15 suspected militants believed to have been inside.
Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer meanwhile sent in troops to start dismantling illegal outposts built by Jewish settlers on Palestinian land, but still earned a frosty response from peace groups.
Ben Eliezer ordered his troops to break up 10 new settlement sites before nightfall on Sunday, public radio said, a week after US President George Bush called for a freeze on settlements in another part of his major Middle East policy speech on Monday.
But Peace Now’s Tzali Reshef said Ben Eliezer’s claims to have already dismantled a number of sites in the Palestinian territories were ”spurious,” and that any sites which had been shut down had been rebuilt.
Washington issued further demands the Palestinians replace their embattled Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a condition in exchange for US support for an independent Palestinian state.
Senior Washington officials said the Palestinians could jeopardise US support for an independent state if they re-elect Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority, widely viewed as corrupt and inefficient.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States will ”work hard” to help Palestinians establish their own state but echoed Bush’s demand they must first overhaul their leadership.
The president ”is going to work hard for a state for the Palestinian people so that they can live side by side in peace with the Jewish state,” Powell told Fox News.
”But it begins with new leadership that is fighting against terror, not tolerating terror or even encouraging terror.”
”What the president did was to finally say what everyone has been thinking,” the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said on US television.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat later accused the Bush administration of having ”no road map, no process, no substance” in its policy toward the Middle East.
He told CNN that the latest US statements on replacing Arafat were ”unacceptable.”
The Israeli army also closed one of its security liaison offices with the Palestinians in Beit Jala on the edge of Bethlehem in the southern West Bank, but said it was a one-off move and it would not shut down other offices.
Palestinian officials warned a rupture in security cooperation would be ”very dangerous.” – Sapa-AFP