10 Palestinians killed in West Bank
Six people, including an 11-year-old girl, were killed during an early morning offensive in the main northern city of Nablus before four militants were shot dead when special forces swooped on a garage in the nearby town of Jenin, Palestinian medical and security sources said.
The victims of the Nablus operation, four of whom were members of a group loyal to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, were shot dead after troops had encircled a house in the Old City area.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Around 20 jeeps and tanks took part in the operation, with aerial cover from an Israeli helicopter.
"A soldier on lookout had spotted a group of armed Palestinians who then forced their way into a house owned by an 80-year-old man," the army's regimental commander in Nablus told AFP.
"We called on them to surrender but they refused and then tried to flee from the house, opening fire," added the colonel, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Four of the dead were members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, an armed offshoot of Arafat's Fatah movement, while the fifth militant was a follower of the leftist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The young girl, Maram Al-Nahleh, was hit by gunfire when she went out of her house as ambulances arrived, medics and relatives said.
"She was watching the ambulances taking away the bodies when soldiers posted on the roof of a house shot at her, hitting her in the face," the girl's grandmother, Mouyassar Al-Nahleh, told AFP.
After news of the killings began to filter through the city, clashes broke out between the soldiers and groups of stone-throwers.
Four more Al-Aqsa Brigades fighters were killed several hours later in a raid by Israeli special forces in the flashpoint town of Jenin.
The soldiers gunned down the four men in a garage in an industrial zone in the north of the town, Palestinian medical and security sources said.
An Israeli military source confirmed that four Palestinian gunmen were killed and another two militants arrested, adding that a number of firearms had been retrieved.
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