Israeli troops killed a Palestinian during a raid on a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank today, Israeli and Palestinian security sources said.
Palestinians said he was among members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades militant group, part of President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement, who had been absorbed into the police following a truce early in 2005.
An Israeli military source said soldiers swooped on Ein al-Sultan camp near Jericho in search of a man wanted in connection with a Palestinian revolt that began in 2000. He was shot while trying to flee capture, the military source said.
"A mortar tube was found in his house," the military source said, adding the army could not confirm whether the man who was killed had worked for the police.
There was no indication the Palestinian, in his 30s, was carrying weapons at the time he was shot.
Israel Radio said the Palestinian was suspected of involvement in a deadly attack inside the Jewish state during the uprising.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, Israeli troops arrested 10 suspected militants, the army said. Raids have been stepped up during efforts to get militants in Gaza to free a captured soldier.
Meanwhile, Israeli missiles tore through the Palestinian Interior Ministry building in Gaza today as Israel kept up nightly air attacks to pressure militants to release an abducted soldier.
The air strike, which wounded at least three people, was launched hours after militants from the governing Hamas movement fired a rocket into a major Israeli city for the first time, an attack that deepened a 10-day-old crisis.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was meeting with top security officials and might order stronger military action in Gaza in response to the attack on the coastal city of Ashkelon, officials said.
Gaza residents were shaken from their beds by the now-familiar sound of a massive explosion as shrapnel and rubble flew from the five-storey Interior Ministry building. The air raid damaged neighbouring apartments, and medics rushed children suffering from shock to hospital.
Israeli aircraft struck the same Interior Ministry complex on June 30, five days after gunmen from Hamas's armed wing and two other factions snatched Corporal Gilad Shalit in a cross-border raid into Israel from Gaza.
There has been little information about Shalit's fate since the 19-year-old tank gunner was captured.
Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronothtoday quoted Arab mediators as saying seven gunmen were holed up with him in an underground bunker somewhere in Gaza, with a hoard of food.