Suspected Arab gunmen killed one Israeli soldier and wounded at least three troops after infiltrating from Jordan
in a rare cross-border raid this morning, Israeli security sources have said.
The sources said Israeli helicopters and ground forces pursued the gunmen into Jordan. The army would not confirm that troops had crossed the border. It said only that Jordanian forces were cooperating fully.V The fighting erupted at the usually quiet border on the Jordan Valley about 10 miles north of the West Bank.
Security sources said they did not know who carried out the attack. Hostilities at the border have been rare since Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994.
A group from Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction wounded an Israeli settler in a shooting in the West Bank yesterday. It said the attack was retaliation for Israel's ban on Arafat attending Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem.
The last major Israeli-Jordanian border incident was in 1997, when a Jordanian soldier fired at a group of Israeli schoolgirls on a field trip to a border site known as "The Island of Peace," killing seven of them.
Jordan's embassy in Israel declined official comment on Tuesday's fighting. There was no immediate comment from Amman.
Security sources said the gunmen shot at an Israeli patrol from across the border. A gunbattle erupted when Israeli troops went to scour the area on their side of the border for infiltrators.
At Yardena, near where the shooting took place, residents awoke to warnings of cross-border infiltration, community representative Uri Menachem said.
"At around 7 a.m. (0500 GMT) the siren went off, and there was an announcement over the P.A. system that there had been an infiltration. We're used to these things, and the security squad went to get weapons," Menachem told Israel Radio.
The main highway on the Israeli side of the border was closed to traffic, a police spokesman said.