Dozens of Israeli tanks firing heavy machineguns raided the northern Gaza Strip on Wednesday and troops shot dead a Palestinian policeman, witnesses and officials said. The incursion underlined the serious obstacles to peace that remain after Israeli-Palestinian talks resumed this week and Washington announced high-level meetings with Palestinians in a new attempt to end Middle East violence.

Thirty tanks swept into the fenced-in Gaza Strip under cover of darkness, entered the village of Beit Lahiya and moved to the outskirts of the Jabalya refugee camp, a stronghold of Palestinian Resistance groups, witnesses said.

They said Israeli forces faced only light resistance as they pushed one mile into Palestinian-ruled territory and conducted house-to-house searches for arms and wanted Resistance men.

"We're under siege," Mohammed al-Masri, mayor of Beit Lahiya, told Reuters as tanks rumbled through his village.

By the time the Israelis started pulling out several hours later, a 29-year-old policeman lay dead from Israeli fire and two Palestinians were wounded, one critically with a gunshot to the head, hospital sources said.

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had been bracing for an Israeli response after a bomber from the Resistance group Hamas killed nine people on an Israeli bus on Sunday.

PHOTO CAPTION

People look through the debris in a Gaza factory on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2002. Israeli helicopters fired missiles at the suspected weapons factory during the night, injuring four people and destroying machines in a strike that followed a series of attacks on Israelis that killed 13 people in 24 hours. (AP Photo/Markus Schreibe