Five people, including a Palestinian baby girl and an Israeli occupation army officer, were killed in scattered Intifadha clashes across the Palestinian territories, as the Palestinian intifadha, uprising against Israeli occupation, neared its second anniversary. Fourteen-month-old Gharam al-Tel died from tear gas inhalation Thursday as violent scuffles erupted between Palestinian residents of Hebron and Israeli troops trying to impose a lockdown on the Palestinian part of the southern West Bank city, reoccupied like most of the West Bank since June.

The Palestinian parts of Hebron have been under an even tighter curfew in recent days, as Israelis headed to the small Jewish settlement at the heart of the city of 120,000 Palestinians to celebrate the Feast of the Tabernacles, which ends at the weekend.

An Israeli man visiting the festival was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper in front of his sons Monday in the town. His three sons were also wounded.

Near the West Bank town on Tulkarem, on the northwest boundary with Israel, an Israeli occupation army officer and a Palestinian resistant man from the Islamic group Hamas were killed in a gunbattle.

The Israeli officer was identified by public radio as Captain Arel Marmelstein, while Palestinian security officials said the Hamas resistant man, whose body was found in a cave in Kfar Labad, just east of Tulkarem, was Nashat Abu Jbara, 24.
Jbara had been wanted by Israel for several years, the occupation army said.

Earlier Thursday, a Palestinian resistant man from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, was shot dead trying to infiltrate the Alei Sinai settlement in the northern Gaza Strip.

The group announced by loudspeaker in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia that the dead resistant man was Bahaa Abu Sultan, aged 23, from the same town, which faces the northern Jewish settlements built on the boundary with Israel.
They said he had been hit with more than 10 bullets from a heavy machine-gun.

Israeli military sources said the occupation army found a Kalashnikov assault rifle, grenades and magazines by his body, adding that troops were hunting another armed man in the same area.

In the northern West Bank city of Jenin Palestinian Mahmud Idris, 52, was killed at dawn by Israeli troops who entered the western sector of the town, a Palestinian security source said, giving no further details.
Two other Palestinians, one of them a man aged 60, were also injured.

The deaths brought to 2,534 the number of people killed as a direct result of the Palestinian uprising which broke out nearly two years ago, including 1,869 Palestinians and 614 Israelis.

The latest killings came as Hamas renewed its attacks with its home-made Qassam rockets, an inaccurate short-range copy of the Katyusha fired blind at a target.

The rockets fired from the Gaza Strip hit an industrial zone in the Negev Desert late Wednesday, Israeli public television said.

The Qassam rockets, produced by Hamas's armed wing the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, hit business premises in the industrial zone of the southern Israeli town of Siderot.

Four of the firm's 40 employees were affected by choking fumes from the ensuing fire which was quickly put out, the television said.

An Israeli source said that another Israeli was slightly injured when a mortar was fired at an industrial site in the same area.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has a private ranch nearby.

Israeli forces have stepped up their incursions into the Gaza Strip in recent weeks to smash metal workshops suspected of manufacturing crude rockets and mortars, with armoured columns probing deeper and harder into Gaza City itself.

Israel snatches resistant bomber planning Jerusalem attack

Israeli occupation forces claim to have meanwhile captured a would-be Palestinian resistance bomber as he was about to launch an attack in Jerusalem.The unidentified Palestinian was arrested at the Aram checkpoint on the edge of Jerusalem, on the road leading north to the occupied Palestinian town of Ramallah, Israeli public radio said Thursday.

PHOTO CAPTION

A Palestinian boy uses a slingshot to throw stones towards Israeli tanks during clashes in the West Bank city of Nablus September 25, 2002. REUTERS/Abed Omar Qusini - Sep 25 8:38 AM E