The car of Israeli settlers which was fired on

OCCUPIED  JERUSALEM, Aug 4 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades held Israel accountable for the killing of one of its cadres Monday, August 4, while claiming responsibility for Sunday gun attack on an Israeli car south of al-Quds (occupied Jerusalem) that wounded four Israeli settlers.

Israel claimed that Nihad Razeq Qassim, 27, was trying to lay a bomb to ambush an Israeli patrol, which shot him dead.

"The man was shot dead by the soldiers (near the village of Farun, not far from Tulkarem) and a bomb of several kilograms was found beside him," Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted an Israeli army spokesman as claiming. 

"The body was left on the scene until daybreak for fear that it might have been booby-trapped or that other bombs were nearby," he added.

However, the Brigades dismissed the Israeli claims as "groundless," asserting that it was a deliberate assassination.

A journalist told IslamOnline.net that Qassim's body was mutilated by Israeli troops, as one witness said that the troops pulled the body over the ground for a long distance.

Razeq, who was also a member of a branch of the Palestinian security services, was wanted by the Israeli army over his involvement in anti-Isralei attacks.

The death brought to 3,388 the number of people killed since the start of the Intifada at the end of September 2000, including 2,553 Palestinians and 774 Israelis, according to an AFP count.

The incident comes as the Palestinian resistance group renewed Sunday its commitment to the three-month truce with Israel after the Palestinian leadership had abandoned plans to expel 18 resistance activists of the Brigades wanted by Israel from the West Bank city of Ramallah.

A row over the 18, arrested Saturday, August 2, at the headquarters of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and were to have been transferred to Jericho or the Gaza Strip, prompted the Brigades to threaten to end its suspension of anti-Israeli attacks.

The activists bravely stood up to an Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank in March 2002.

Israelis Wounded

Meanwhile, the Brigades claimed Sunday responsibility for a gun attack on a car of Israeli settlers south of al-Quds, that wounded an Israeli woman and her three children, AFP said.

"A unit of our Brigades set up an ambush for Zionist settlers near the village of Ouallaja and, when their vehicle passed our fighters they opened fire on it, hitting several of them," the group said in a statement, vowing to "pursue resistance operations."

Israeli emergency service officials said the four Israelis were wounded when a burst of gunfire hit their car near the entrance to Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood built on Palestinian land annexed after the 1967 Middle East war.

The Settlers' Council, which represents Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, lashed out at the government saying the three-month ceasefire was only benefiting "Palestinian militant groups."

It also condemned the Israeli government's plans to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and to transfer more West Bank cities to "terrorists", as part of efforts to give a boost to the U.S.-backed roadmap for peace.