JENIN, West Bank, Sept 27 (AFP) - Four Palestinians were killed by Israeli gunfire in the occupied territories on Monday, while the Jewish state's army pressed a large search and arrest operation in Jenin, security sources said.
Israel's diplomatic missions abroad went on high alert, meanwhile, in the aftermath of the assassination of a Hamas leader in Damascus blamed on Israeli agents.
The military shot dead two Palestinian militants in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday as they tried to plant a bomb near the fence which separates the Jewish state from the Palestinian territory, said security sources on both sides.
The Popular Resistance Committees, an armed group partly composed of former members of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, said it had sent the two on the mission.
In the south of the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian man was killed in a school yard by Israeli army gunfire, while Israeli police said towns across the border had come under attack from homemade Palestinian rockets.
Unrest also struck the West Bank where an Israeli settler near Nablus killed a Palestinian man. The settler, who was arrested by Israeli police, said he had shot in self-defence after 41-year-old Sayyel Jibara tried to steal his car.
A Palestinian witness at the scene told AFP that the settler had got out of his own vehicle and shot Jibara at point blank range.
More than 70 Israeli military vehicles raided Jenin in a hunt for militants, the army said, sparking clashes with gunmen and stone-throwing youths.
Medics said nine Palestinians were wounded by Israeli gunfire, most of them unarmed youths, and that two were in critical condition.
The troops briefly stormed Al-Razi hospital, the office of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and a local branch of the education ministry, Palestinian sources said.
Gunshots could be heard outside the hospital.
The head of Al-Razi, Fawwaz Hamad, said the hospital's operating theatre had been destroyed by the troops and much of the equipment damaged beyond repair.
He said the hospital, which is run by a charity with close links to the hardline Hamas, was not harboring militants.
Palestinian security sources said a hospital janitor and security guard were arrested while two Hamas militants were seized in the town's refugee camp.
Troops maintained a cordon round Jenin's public hospital well into Monday afternoon and the entrance to the town was sealed by tanks while barbed wire blocked access to the refugee camp where troops carried out house-to-house searches.
Military sources quoted on public radio said the raid had been long planned, branding Jenin the "top centre of terrorism" after Nablus, the West Bank's largest city and which Israel has said shelters most radical militants.
Zakaria Zubeidi, the Jenin leader of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- a radical movement loosely affiliated to Fatah -- was among those the army was hunting, the sources said.
Israeli officials, meanwhile, said security had been stepped up at embassies and consulates worldwide for fear of armed reprisals after Sunday's killing of a Hamas leader, Ezzeddin Sheikh Khalil, in Damascus.
"We must be on our guard," Israel's deputy defence minister, Zeev Boim, told public radio.
Both Syria and Hamas blamed Israel for the assassination while Israeli officials opted to stay quiet, officially.
But Israeli media quoted defense sources as saying the Jewish state was behind the "targeted killing", the first assassination of a senior Hamas man abroad since a 1997 botched attempt against the life of the group's politburo chief Khaled Meshaal in Amman.
"Syria cannot possibly enjoy immunity when it shelters the headquarters of (Palestinian) terrorist organizations ... All those involved in anti-Israeli attacks must know that their lives are at risk," Boim said.