by Marius Schattner
JERUSALEM, Aug 13 (AFP) - A Jewish settler was shot dead and another wounded on Friday by a Palestinian gunman who was later gunned down by guards at a nearby Jewish settlement in the northern West Bank.
The gunman opened fire on a car outside Itamar settlement near Nablus, fatally wounding the driver and slightly hurting a passenger, an Israeli military source said.
The assailant then seized an M-16 automatic rifle from the dying driver. He ran off, firing both guns at several settlement guards who gave chase, but they managed to kill him, the source said.
The settler was named as 50-year-old Shlomo Miller from Itamar.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's mainstream Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to AFP, naming the militant as Yussef Ahmed Hanani, 25.
The caller said Hanani was a lieutenant in the Palestinian preventive security forces. The attack was retaliation for deadly recent Israeli incursions in Nablus' Balata refugee camp and in the Gaza Strip.
The deaths raised to 4,228 the overall toll since the September 2000 launch of the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, including 3,230 Palestinians and 927 Israelis, according to an AFP tally.
In Gaza City, four Palestinians suffered bullet wounds during an Israeli incursion into the Zeitun district, security sources said.
Also Friday, Israel police announced the arrest of a third Palestinian in connection with Wednesday's botched bomb attack at a temporary checkpoint at the northern entrance to Jerusalem.
Two Palestinian civilians were killed and 18 other people were wounded, among them six Israeli border guards, in the attack.
Two other suspects were detained on Wednesday and Thursday, police said.
In a surprise development, the army's chief of staff said Israel could hand back the Golan Heights seized from Syria in 1967 as part of an eventual peace deal with Damascus.
"From the point of view of military requiurements we could reach an agreement with Syria by giving up the Golan," Moshe Yaalon told the Yediot Aharnot daily.
But a senior official close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that no such decision was imminent.
On the political front, a poll published in Yediot on Friday showed most Israelis were in favour of a secular government without the participation of any religious factions.
Fifty-nine percent of the 500 respondents were in favour of a cabinet made up of Sharon's right-wing Likud party, the opposition Labour party and the centre-right Shinui party.
Meanwhile, Internal Security Minister Tzahi Hanegbi warned that a planned hunger strike by thousands of Palestinian prisoners would not achieve its aims.
Nearly 8,000 Palestinian prisoners are planning an open-ended hunger strike from Sunday.
The prisoners are demanding better health care, hygienic food and conditions, and an end to "humiliating body searches". They are also demanding Israel stop suspending visitation rights as a form of punishment.
"I categorically reject the demands of the terrorists and they should know that contrary to what has happened in the past, they will get nothing," Hanegbi told reporters.
"We will agree to no softening of the strict rules that we decreed to prevent them from pursuing their terrorist activities" behind bars, the minister said.
Prison commissioner Yaakov Ganot has threatened to halt family visits and impose solitary confinement on any prisoner who goes on strike.