Nazir Majally • Arab News Staff

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 9 August 2003 — Israel shattered weeks of relative calm in the region yesterday when its troops raided a West Bank Palestinian refugee camp and killed four people, two of them Hamas activists. One Israeli soldier was also killed. Hamas vowed to punish Israel over the raid. Palestinian medics in Nablus said that aside from the Hamas activists, two more Palestinians were killed, a man of 20 from bullet wounds after throwing stones at Israeli troops in a street protest over the raid and a 41-year-old bystander who inhaled tear gas sprayed by soldiers.

In addition to the bloodshed in Nablus’ Askar refugee camp, a Palestinian was seriously wounded in a clash with troops on the outskirts of Jenin and violence also erupted along the Lebanese frontier.

During the Nablus raid, the Israeli Army blew up a building that housed eight families. Senior Hamas political leader Abdel Aziz Al-Rantissi said that Hamas would react to the incursion but said it stood by a three-month truce declared on June 29 in keeping with a US-backed Middle East peace plan.

“We are still committed to the hudna (cease-fire) but the violation by the Israelis will not pass without a reaction. There will be a reaction to each Israeli violation,” he said.

“(Hamas’ military wing) has the full right to teach the Zionists a lesson,” Rantissi said in Gaza City.

Another prominent Hamas figure, Ismail Abu Shanab, said earlier that it would reassess the truce deal, seriously strained by yesterday’s raid. An Israeli field commander said the raid was aimed at arresting two senior Hamas men planning attacks on Israelis.

Hamas’ armed wing, the Izz El-Deen Al-Qassam Brigades, promised a payback. “The crimes of the Zionist enemy committed against our people... will not pass without the enemy paying a proper price for these violations,” it said in a statement.

“We call on our resistance cells to respond to these crimes and to teach the enemy a deterrent lesson,” the statement added in an appeal which Abu Shanab said he supported.

The Brigades identified their dead as Fayez Assader, 26, Qassam’s commander in the Nablus area, and Khamis Abu Salem, 22.

On the Lebanese border, Hezbollah used anti-tank missiles, automatic weapons and mortar bombs to attack Israeli Army posts at Sheba Farms. The group regards the area as Lebanese territory. The United Nations says it is Israeli-occupied Syrian land.

Israeli military sources said there were no Israeli casualties in the attack, launched six days after a booby-trapped car killed a Hezbollah official in Beirut in a blast that Hezbollah blamed on Israel. Lebanese Information Minister Michel Samaha agreed with Hezbollah that the blast was an Israeli terrorist operation.

Witnesses in south Lebanon said Israeli aircraft responded with heavy strikes on the eastern and southern edges of the Lebanese border village of Kfar Shouba. Military sources said Israel fired artillery and Apache helicopter gunships took to the air to try to locate the source of Hezbollah fire.