Ramallah - Israeli soldiers pressed on with a search-and-
arrest raid in Nablus for the second day running Friday, witnesses
and the military said.
The soldiers shot dead an unarmed, 25-year-old taxi driver who
failed to heed orders to stop in the northern West Bank city,
hospital officials said.
An Israeli military spokesman confirmed the taxi driver was
unarmed, but said he was transporting two armed militants and that
the soldiers were directing their fire at them.
Since the operation began early Thursday, the soldiers arrested at
least nine 'wanted' militants, several of them members of the al-Aqsa
Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah
party.
They also uncovered an explosives laboratory and confiscated some
pipe bombs, grenades, ammunition and equipment in several other
apartments during house-to-house searches in the Casbah or historic
Old City centre, the army said.
On Friday, the army expanded the searches to the Nablus' Balate
refugee camp.
Four Israeli soldiers were injured, two of them seriously, in
clashes Thursday with local militants who confronted them with semi-
automatic fire and detonated six explosive devices against them.
New Palestinian Information Minister Riad Malki, who also serves
as spokesman for the emergency government set up by President Mahmoud
Abbas in the West Bank, condemned the Nablus raid as well as a
military incursion in Gaza earlier this week which targeted rocket
launchers and in which 12 Palestinians were killed.
In a statement late Thursday, he accused Israel of undermining his
government's efforts to impose security, law and order in the West
Bank after Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip.
Referring to the al-Aqsa Brigades, he said the Nablus raid
targeted 'groups who expressed willingness to cooperate with the
government to end lawlessness.'
Abbas issued a presidential decree this week, ordering all
Palestinian armed groups to hand in their weapons. Al-Aqsa commanders
however have in fact said they did not regard the decree as applying
to them and vowed to hold on to their arms.
The Israeli military said the raid was aimed at foiling ongoing
attempts by al-Aqsa and Islamic Jihad militants to launch suicide
bombings from the city inside Israel, pointing out that 117 would-be
suicide bombers were arrested and nine bomb belts tracked down in
Nablus during similar raids in 2006.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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