Israeli forces kill 3 more Palestinians

Israel said its forces gunned down a member of an armed commando infiltrating the country Wednesday, hours after killing two Palestinians in a growing crackdown on militants in the wake of a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.

Amid the violence, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon counter-attacked politically against stinging corruption allegations that have damaged his image just three weeks ahead of general elections.

Israeli soldiers patrolling near the borders with Jordan and Syria killed an unidentified man and captured another after they had infiltrated the country, Israeli military sources said.

The gunmen opened fire on a patrol in the Hamat Gader area, a spring beside the Yarmuk river marking the border with Jordan and some 15 kilometres (nine miles) from Syria, the sources added.

But Syria's official Sana news agency quoted a military spokesman as saying a Syrian police officer was killed in the UN-monitored border zone separating Syria from Israel.

A second policeman went missing during the incident, when the two officers and a third man crossed into the border sector in an attempt to bring back water from a nearby river, Sana said.

"One of them was killed and the other went missing following gunfire that came from the Israeli side," the spokesman said.

"A Syrian patrol that was nearby returned fire at the Israeli side," he said, adding that shooting at civilians in the border zone was a violation of an agreement between Israel and Syria following the 1973 Israeli-Arab War.

Earlier, the Israeli army shot dead an 18-year-old civilian in the northern West Bank village of Saida, Palestinian witnesses said. He was said to have been standing on a roof near a house soldiers were demolishing when one of them opened fire on him. But an army spokesman said Israeli forces had responded to Palestinian fire and that the youth had been armed.

Another Palestinian was killed during an exchange of fire with soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis, a few hundred meters (yards) from the Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim, Palestinian witnesses said.

Following a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv Sunday that killed 22 people, Israel further tightened restrictions on Palestinian movement. It confined senior officials to their cities and barred all other Palestinians under 35 from leaving the territories.

A top-level Palestinian delegation was also prevented from travelling to London for talks next week on internal reforms with other regional and international interlocutors, at the invitation of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The United States, which has long called for a change in the Palestinian leadership and the overhaul of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, did not condemn the Israeli ban although Russia called for Israel to revoke its decision.