Israel is suspending security contacts with the Palestinian authority after Palestinian gunmen killed three Jewish settlers in a drive-by shooting in the West Bank, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday.

Israeli officials are demanding that a Palestinian crackdown on militants after Sunday's attack, which tore at a flimsy ceasefire a month after the Jewish state completed a pullout from the Gaza Strip.

"As a result of yesterday's attacks we are taking defensive action on the ground to prevent future occurrences," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. "There is also a temporary suspension of contacts between the Defence Ministry and military personnel and Palestinian counterparts."

Israeli officials said on Sunday night that the army would re-impose some restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank that had been lifted as part of rapprochement efforts in recent months.

A Defence Ministry source said troops would encircle major West Bank cities and require that Palestinians travel between them by public transportation only, rather than private cars.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the shootings outside Gush Etzion settlement bloc and Eli settlement, the bloodiest of their kind in four months.

Three settlers died in the Gush Etzion attack and four other Israelis were hurt, medics said.

Minutes later, Palestinian gunmen fired on a junction outside Eli, wounding two settlers.

In the far north of the West Bank on Sunday, troops shot dead an Islamic Jihad militant commander after he opened fire on them, Palestinian witnesses and Israeli military sources said.

Foreign Islamists recruiting

Israel's military intelligence chief said yesterday that foreign Islamists suspected of having al-Qaida links have slipped into Gaza to recruit Palestinians since Israel withdrew from the territory last month.

Israeli troops completed their pullout on September 12 after 38 years of occupation, handing over control of Gaza's southern border to neighboring Egypt. Traffic across the frontier went largely unchecked for days before Egyptian police sealed it.

"We know of around 10 global jihad operatives who infiltrated into Gaza from the Sinai during the Philadelphi episode," Major General Aharon Zeevi-Farkash told Maariv newspaper, using Israel's name for the Gaza-Egypt border.

"There is a potential here for the beginning of an al-Qaida infrastructure in Gaza," he said.
 
"Global Jihad" is a term Israeli officials use for foreign Islamists loosely affiliated with, or inspired by, Osama bin Laden's international al-Qaida network.

The Palestinian authority, which is scrambling to rein in rival armed factions and turn Gaza into a model for future statehood, has denied any al-Qaida presence in the territory.

A spate of suicide bombings earlier this year in Sinai, just south of Gaza and Israel, stirred Israeli concern about possible al-Qaida involvement. But Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said probes showed no links between the bombers and outside groups.

Zeevi-Farkash said the foreign Islamists alleged to have entered Gaza aimed to recruit Palestinian militants disaffected by their factions' policies.

(China Daily October 18, 2005)