JABALIA, Gaza Strip (AFP) - Seven Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in the occupied territories as the army pressed on with a massive raid into the northern Gaza Strip to try to stop militant rocket attacks.
Israeli tanks and jeeps, backed by helicopters, swarmed into the Gaza Strip near the Jabalia refugee camp late Tuesday.
Three Palestinians were killed and 17 wounded as Israeli troops clashed with gunmen around Jabalia.
They were identified as 22-year-old Tawfik Ali Sharafi, a fighter with Hamas' armed wing, the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, and Ahmed Madi, 17, and Said Abu Eish, 14.
Another teenager, 13-year-old Mohammed Jaber, was killed when Israeli soldiers opened fire on stone-throwing youths near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim further south in the Gaza Strip.
Hundreds of Hamas supporters attended the funeral of Sharafi as they vowed to avenge his death.
The radical group warned it would "inflict a lesson on the enemy" if its tanks were to roll into the refugee camp which, is adjacent to the town of Jabalia.
"No Israeli offensive will stop our rockets," the statement said, referring to the makeshift "Qassam" rockets, named after the brigades and regularly fired at Israel.
In the northern West Bank, two Palestinians were killed in a botched Israeli asassination attempt against a militant from the hardline group Islamic Jihad, Palestinian security sources said.
Ahmed Chalabi managed to get out of a taxi just before troops fired at the vehicle.
His brother-in-law and the taxi driver were killed instead, and a third passenger was wounded.
Israeli military sources said they had received "concrete" intelligence that two Palestinians involved in "terrorist" activities were riding in the taxi.
"The taxi was hunted down and did not stop although warning shots were fired. It then crashed into a wall," they said.
"One of the passengers died instantly and another one managed to escape and we fired at him," they added.
The sources had earlier denied that troops had opened fire at the vehicle.
Israeli troops meanwhile rolled back into Jenin after briefly withdrawing following a wide search-and-arrest operation in the city in which some 100 Palestinians were nabbed.
Around 25 jeeps participated in the Wednesday morning incursion, security sources said, adding that the house of wanted Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades local leader, Zakaria Zubeidi, had been dynamited by the army in between the two raids.
Earlier in the northern West Bank city of Nablus, troops killed another Brigades' militant, security sources said.
The Jabalia raid came hot on the heels of militant rocket attacks on southern Israel Tuesday.
"We can't completely stop the firing of rockets but we will at least try to decrease it," an Israeli military source said. "As long as the Palestinian security forces do not go after these people, the attacks won't completely stop."
Palestinians complain that their ability to maintain security has been thwarted by Israel since the beginning of the four-year-old intifada in September 2000, with the systematic destruction of infrastructure such as police stations and killing of their men.
The Israeli sources said troops faced two major difficulties when going after the men firing rockets.
"First, it's very hard for us to find them as it takes just a couple minutes to fire a rockets from the back of a car which then disappears. It's a cat and mouse game," one source said.
"Second, they use the civilian population as human shields by hiding in their backyards and orchards which limits our operations since we don't want to cause major collateral" damage.
In other unrest Wednesday, two US Christian pacifists said they were badly beating up by Jewish settlers near the southern West Bank town of Hebron.
Chris Brown and Kin Lambery from Christian Peacemaker Teams told AFP settlers had attacked them with "thick metals chains, sticks and rocks" as they were walking Palestinian children to school.
The two were taken to an Israeli hospital for treatment.
Meanwhile, Israel's military intelligence chief said he expected regional threats against the Jewish state to weaken in 2005.
General Aharon Zeevi Farkash was quoted in Israeli media as saying that the planned withdrawal from Gaza would ease friction with the Palestinians.
He also predicted that United States would step efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction after the November 2004 presidential polls and pressure Syria to stop harboring Palestinian "terrorist" groups.