Israeli occupation troops shot dead two youths and wounded 18 people during clashes at a Palestinian refugee camp on Wednesday just days after a raid in the Gaza Strip drew international condemnation. Palestinian witnesses said Israeli occupation forces approaching the edge of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip opened fire on a crowd throwing stones and homemade stun grenades. Residents said one of the dead youths was 16 and the other was between 11 and 13.

The Israel occupation army said its troops patrolling the border with Egypt returned fire when resistance men shot at them from Rafah.

Tensions were running high in the Gaza Strip following an Israel raid in the central Gaza town of Khan Younis on Monday in which 16 people were killed and 80 were wounded.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has vowed to keep up the pressure on Gaza-based resistance men waging a two-year-old uprising against Israeli occupation despite U.S. criticism as Washington pursued Arab support for a possible war on Iraq.

Palestinian officials called Monday's assault a massacre of unarmed civilians. Sharon expressed regret for civilian casualties but Israel insisted most of the dead were resistance men .

Also on Wednesday, an Israeli man wounded the day before when his car was ambushed by Palestinian resistance men died at a Jerusalem hospital. Three other people were hurt in the attack.

Hospital sources in Rafah said the 18 Palestinians wounded by Israeli tank-mounted machineguns were mostly children and teenagers. They said the youngest was a two-year-old, who was lightly grazed by a bullet.

The occupation army said it found a large bomb planted in the area, known as a resistance stronghold.

In further confrontations in Khan Younis, seven children were wounded by Israeli fire near a housing development and at a schoolyard, medics said. None of the injuries was serious.

The occupation army said its soldiers opened fire with non-lethal weapons when a group of Palestinians advanced on a guard tower.

"CLOUDS OF WAR"

Focusing on external threats, Sharon said in a speech to occupation soldiers that "clouds of war" were gathering over the Middle East, a clear reference to possible U.S. action against Iraq.

He vowed Israel, which was hit by 39 Iraqi missiles in the 1991 Gulf War, "would protect its citizens." But he did not say whether that meant occupation army retaliation, which Israeli media reports have said Washington is discouraging.

In Paris, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said after talks with French President Jacques Chirac that tensions over Iraq should not alter Israeli policy over the Palestinian conflict.

"I told the president that Israel doesn't search (for) war. We don't want to create the impression there is an extension of the conflict between the Palestinians and ourselves," he said.

The latest confrontations coincided with Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer's announcement of the start of a campaign to remove rogue Jewish settler outposts in the West Bank and the deployment of occupation troops to dismantle three uninhabited sites.

Ben-Eliezer has said small clutches of caravans dotting the hilltops must go because they were too vulnerable to attack and placed a heavy burden on security occupation forces battling the uprising.

Israeli governments have established 145 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the 1967 war. The international community regards settlements as illegal. Israel disputes this.

Nabil Abu Rdainah, an adviser to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, said the removal of the outposts was a smokescreen to cloud "assaults against the Palestinian people."

In the West Bank village of Salfit, the occupation army dynamited the homes of two activists of the resistance Islamic group Hamas accused of involvement in killing two Israelis in August.

Israel on Wednesday released a Reuters journalist, Palestinian cameraman Jussry al-Jamal, whom it had been holding in jail without charge for more than five months.

Israeli officials had accused Jamal, arrested in the West Bank city of Hebron, of having contacts with resistance groups but never made public any evidence supporting the allegation.

PHOTO CAPTION

Palestinians carry the body of 15-year-old Mohamed Ashor after he was killed during clashes between Palestinian stone throwers and Israeli occupation soldiersin the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza strip October 9, 2002. Israeli occupation troops shot dead two youths and wounded 18 people during clashes at the camp, just days after another raid in the Gaza Strip drew international condemnation. (Reuter