BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AFP) — Israeli undercover forces killed four Palestinian militants, including two high-ranking commanders, in a raid in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Wednesday.
The strike raised tensions after a five-day lull in violence between Israel and Palestinian militants in and around the Gaza Strip as Egypt was attempting to broker a more permanent truce between the two sides.
"Islamic Jihad and the other resistance groups have the right to respond in any place to this crime of assassination and all options are open," Dawud Shihab, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad in Gaza, told AFP.
"What the enemy has done undermines any talk of a ceasefire," he said.
The dead included Mohammed Shahada, 48, a top leader in the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad movement, and Ahmed al-Balbul, 48, a senior official in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group loosely tied to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party, Palestinian security officials said.
An Israeli army spokeswoman confirmed an undercover special force carried out the attack in the town of Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem.
"During an arrest raid, the force identified several armed men in a vehicle, opened fire at them and identified killing them," she said.
A senior Israeli security official confirmed the identities of the four but said they all belonged to Islamic Jihad.
The official, who asked not to be named, said Shahada was "wanted for eight years for his involvement in several attacks against Israelis," and had "direct ties with Islamic Jihad headquarters in Syria."
Earlier in the day, the Israeli army killed another Islamic Jihad militant in the north of the occupied West Bank.
The West Bank raids came as Israel, the Islamist Hamas movement and Islamic Jihad had been observing an uneasy, tacit truce in and around the Gaza Strip, where there has been a five-day lull in violence.
Egypt has been holding talks with the armed groups aimed at securing a more permanent ceasefire with Israel and lifting a crippling regime of Israeli and international sanctions on the impoverished territory.
But after the Bethlehem ambush, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the "assassination of this group of four is a crime and a dangerous escalation."
"There is no meaning to any ceasefire in the midst of these crimes," he told AFP. "Hamas confirms that any ceasefire must be comprehensive, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip... This crime demands a response from the resistance."
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak had earlier in the day denied that any truce, tacit or otherwise, had been reached between the two sides and vowed further operations against Palestinian armed groups.
"We are expecting other operations in the near future and the pursuit of our fight against Gaza risks provoking an escalation on other fronts," Barak said during a visit to troops near the Gaza border.
"The Palestinian Authority is not ensuring security, it's the Israeli army," he said. "There is no desire on the Palestinian side to act against terrorism."
Barak warned later on Wednesday that Israel should "take into consideration the possibility of seeing a less friendly government than that of Abu Mazen (Abbas) in the West Bank."
Senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniya said "the ball is in Israel's court" with regard to any future ceasefire.
"We are not running after a truce," he said during a speech at Gaza's Islamic University, adding that any ceasefire had to be "reciprocal, simultaneous and comprehensive."
The violence in and around the Gaza Strip, where Hamas seized power in June after routing forces loyal to Abbas, has cast a shadow over peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian leadership.
At least 351 people, most of them Gaza militants, have been killed since Israel and the Palestinians formally relaunched peace talks at a conference in the United States in late November, according to an AFP count.
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