HIGHLIGHTS: PFLP-GC Accuses Israel Who Denies the Charge||Lebanese Authorities Detain Nine Palestinian PFLP-GC Members||Israel Detains Two Palestinians in Hebron as Incursions Into Palestinian-ruled Areas Continue||STORY: A car bombing killed a senior military commander of a radical Palestinian group Monday. The group - which is led by the victim's father, Ahmed Jibril - blamed Israel and vowed retaliation. (Read photo caption)

Israel denied any connection to the midday blast on a street off the busy shopping area of Corniche Mazraa in Beirut's Muslim sector.

"The defense minister says Israel is not connected and to stop blaming Israel," said Yarden Vatikay, an adviser to Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.

Jihad Jibril, 38, was driving the car when the bomb went off and was killed instantly. There were no other casualties in the explosion.

Jibril was a senior commander of military operations in Lebanon for his father's faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a small Syrian-based group on the State Department list of terrorist organizations for its attacks on Israelis.

Last month, the senior Jibril warned that bombings against Israelis would continue in retaliation for Israeli military attacks.
However, the PFLP-GC has not claimed responsibility for bombings since the latest violence erupted in September 2000. Last month, the PFLP-GC and two other rival groups each claimed to have blown up an Israeli tank in the Gaza Strip.

But the PFLP-GC was accused by Lebanese authorities of firing rockets across the Lebanese border into Israel in April at the height of the West Bank offensive and of seeking to launch more attacks on the Jewish state. Nine Palestinians who Lebanese authorities said belonged to the PFLP-GC have been arrested on charges of illegal possession of weapons and threatening national security.

Jibril's Damascus-based group is a part of an alliance of radical Palestinian factions that opposes peace negotiations with Israel that Arafat began with the 1993 Oslo accords.

Once famed for its guerrilla operations, it has been largely on the sidelines of the Palestinian uprising against Israel that erupted in 2000, but had claimed responsibility for a shipment of arms Israel intercepted en route to the West Bank a year ago.

ISRAELI INCURSIONS CONTINUING.

In the occupied Territories Israel has kept up raids into West Bank cities, including overnight incursions into Tulkarm and Hebron, where troops detained two men, after winding down the military sweep it unleashed against Palestinian-ruled areas on March 29.

Occupation troops have pulled out of reoccupied West Bank cities, but have strangled normal life with checkpoints and travel curbs that ordinary Palestinians find humiliating and punitive.

PHOTO CAPTION

Lebanese police inspect the damaged car in the Corniche Mazraa area of Beirut, Lebanon, Monday May 20,2002. A bomb-rigged car exploded Monday in a busy Beirut neighborhood, destroying the vehicle and killing Jihad Jibril, the son of radical Palestinian Resistance leader Ahmed Jibril, Lebanese Hezbollah Resistance television reported. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Tawil)