Last update - 00:00 16/12/2006
20-year-old Palestinian militant killed by IDF fire in Nablus
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondent
Israel Defense Forces troops shot and killed an armed Palestinian man in the West Bank city of Nablus early Saturday.
Twenty soldiers entered Nablus' old city in search of wanted militants and opened fire on 20-year-old gunman Amin Makhlouf.
Army Radio reported that explosives were hurled at IDF troops immediately prior to the shooting. According to the report, no injuries were suffered by the troops.
Makhlouf took more than seven bullets to the chest and other parts of his body and was killed instantly, hospital sources said.
He was identified as a member of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction.
On Thursday, two Palestinians, Mohammed Rammah, 26, and Wahib al-Dik, 27, were killed by IDF fire in the West Bank.
Rammah, whom the IDF identified as the head of Fatah's military wing in Nablus, was killed during an attempt to arrest him in the city's refugee camp. Members of the police's special antiterror unit had blocked the road on which Rammah was driving. When he spotted them, he tried to turn the vehicle around, crashing into another car.
At that point, Rammah and his aide, who was traveling with him, tried to flee on foot. The police then opened fire from close range, according to army sources. Rammah was killed and the aide, Ibrahim Zakzuk, was seriously wounded. The two men were carrying an M-16 rifle and a pistol with them at the time.
Palestinian sources said a 10-year-old boy was also seriously wounded in the incident. Army sources said that the boy was a passenger in the car Rammah struck while trying to flee, and was injured in the crash rather than by Israeli fire.
Colonel Amir Baram, commander of the Samaria Brigade, said Rammah was directly involved in a suicide bombing attempt that the army had thwarted several hours earlier. The bombing was foiled when soldiers at a checkpoint east of Nablus stopped a car carrying four Palestinians and found an eight-kilogram bomb inside. All four men were affiliated with Fatah. The bomb was apparently intended for use in a city in central Israel.
Army sources said that Rammah was also directly involved in five other attempted suicide bombings over the last several months, in addition to being intensively involved in bomb-making and recruiting. For the past few months, he has been at the top of the army's wanted list in the northern West Bank.
The second man killed in a separate incident on Thursday was Wahib al-Dik. He was killed in the village of al-Dik, near Nablus, during a clash between soldiers and Palestinians, who were throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at the troops. According to army sources, soldiers opened fire on al-Dik when they saw him preparing to throw a concrete block at them from the top of a high staircase.