Two Palestinians, including a woman, were killed in an attack on an Israeli occupation army post near the West Bank town of Nablus, hours after three occupation soldiers were gunned down, in an upsurge of violence ahead of Israel's elections.A group of four armed Palestinians attacked the occupation army position near the Jewish settlement of Homesh in the northern West Bank, and occupation soldiers returned fire, killing two and wounding one, while the fourth assailant escaped.

Palestinian women have carried out resistance attacks but Friday's operation, for which there was no immediate claim, was a rare case of a woman involved in an anti-Israeli raid.

In Gaza City, a Palestinian woman died of a heart attack during an Israeli helicopter missile attack on Gaza City overnight, Palestinian medical sources told AFP.

Fatma al-Mashharawi, in her 30s, was an in-patient at Al-Ahli hospital where a missile landed on a chapel inside the medical compound causing heavy damage, the sources said.

The latest deaths brought to 2,883 the number of people killed since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, including 2,140 Palestinians and 687 Israelis.

Late Thursday, three Israeli occupation soldiers were killed in an ambush near Hebron in the southern West Bank.

The attack was claimed by the armed wing of the resistance Islamic group Hamas, the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, which said the shooting was in response to "the aggression of the Israeli occupation army and its attacks on Palestinian civilians".
The gunmen fled the scene and Israeli occupation troops imposed a curfew on the surrounding area, military sources said.

Several occupation soldiers have been killed in similar ambushes in Hebron, where occupation troops are more exposed than in other West Bank cities due to their role of protecting hardline settlers in the heart of a city of 120,000 Palestinians.

In the Gaza Strip, an Israeli helicopter fired eight missiles at targets in Gaza City overnight, causing heavy damage to the chapel as well as metal workshop and several other buildings, Palestinian security sources said.

Apart from the woman who died in hospital, another Palestinian was wounded.

Israeli occupation troops also destroyed the house of a resistance activist from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah group who was killed in 2001 and arrested five members of his family.

Shortly after the raid, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades fired home-made rockets across the Israeli border from the northern Gaza Strip.

One of them hit the town of Sderot in southern Israel while another fell just south of the city of Ashkelon, but only material damage was reported.

The occupation army staged a retaliatory incursion into the autonomous Palestinian town of Beit Hanun, from where such rockets are often fired.

The fresh spate of attacks by resistance groups came a day after Palestinian hardliners ruled out any truce agreement ahead of inter-factional talks in Cairo planned for Friday.

The much-delayed discussions under the aegis of Egypt are aimed at reaching a halt to anti-Israeli attacks and a common position on the means of pursuing the intifada against Israeli occupation.

But on Thursday, Hamas and its smaller hardline rival Islamic Jihad as well as Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades all said they would not halt their attacks.

The fresh outburst of violence in the Palestinian territories temporarily eclipsed the scandals which have hung over the Israeli election campaign in the final runup to Tuesday's vote.

Opinion polls published Thursday showed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing Likud party set to cruise to victory in the upcoming elections, dealing the Labour party its worst ever defeat.

A survey in Yediot Aharonot newspaper credited Likud with either 33 or 34 seats in the 120-member parliament in next week's general elections, up from 19 in the current house.

Labour, beset by internal squabbles, was tipped to muster just 18 or 19 seats, down from 25.

The centre-left party, which engineered the autonomy deals with the Palestinians that now lie in tatters, triggered the snap elections by quitting Sharon's national unity coalition in October. It has since voted in a dovish new leader, Amram Mitzna.

PHOTO CAPTION

Palestinian woman sits in front of her destroyed house