Israeli helicopter gunships killed a senior resistance leader of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad in Gaza City, as violence also took the lives of Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank. Mohammed al-Hindi, a top Jihad political leader, named the dead man as 50-year-old Mohammed al-Zatma whose car was hit and destroyed by two missiles in Al-Nasser, in the north of the city.

Twelve Palestinians in the vicinity, including three children, were injured, hospital sources said.

Zatma, a resident of the impoverished Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip was a civil engineer in Rafah's municipality and had been wanted by Israel since 1992, Hindi said.

"This murder is a great loss for the Palestinian people; Zatma is the most senior Islamic Jihad military leader to have been killed in Gaza," he added.

"Israel is trying to use the situation in Iraq to crush our people so that it will surrender, but the resistance will continue and so will our war against the (Israeli) occupation," he said.

Hindi said he expected Israel's "assassinations of our leadership will increase, especially after the fall of Baghdad; I also expect renewed aggression against our people."

On Tuesday, a military leader of Hamas was killed in a similar Israeli air strike which also killed six other Palestinians and left 47 wounded.

Hamas has vowed to avenge those deaths.

Tuesday's air attack, part of an ongoing Israeli policy of killing leading Palestinian "terrorists," was the first since the war on Iraq started on March 20.

In the West Bank's Jordan Valley, meanwhile, two Palestinians and two Israelis were killed in an exchange of fire early Thursday, occupation sources said.

An armed Palestinian unit opened automatic gunfire on a "group of Israelis" who returned fire, they said, without saying whether the Israelis were settlers or soldiers.

Two Palestinian resistance groups claimed responsibility for what they said was "a joint operation.

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and the Abu Ali Mustafa Martyrs Brigades, said they had carried out the operation.

Six Israelis were also wounded, and some of the assailants managed to flee.

One Palestinian was also killed and four others wounded by an undercover Israeli occupation army unit in the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem.

The occupation soldiers opened fire on a Palestinian vehicle carrying armed men.

In a controversial move, the Israeli occupation army ordered the expulsion of a detained Islamic Jihad member from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.

Mahmoud Saadi, 30, held in the detention camp of Ofer, is to be banished for two years as of next week, but can challenge the order before a military court.

The last such expulsion was in September, when Israel banished two Palestinians after finding them guilty of helping their brother organize a double human bombing in Tel Aviv.

PHOTO CAPTION

Palestinians crowd around the remains of the car in which the leader of the resistance group, Islamic Jihad, Mahmoud al-Zatma, was killed when an Israeli helicopter fired several missiles on it (AFP/File/Pedro Ugarte)