Israeli army kills Palestinian boy in West Bank

Soldiers shot dead an 11-year-old boy in the West Bank yesterday, the second Palestinian child killed by Israeli gunfire in two days, witnesses said.

There was a glimmer of hope for struggling efforts to end the conflict with word that a top decision-making body of the Palestine Liberation Organisation would meet early next month to ratify steps towards reforms deemed key for peace.

But with world attention diverted by a possible U.S. war on Iraq, Israeli-Palestinian violence has surged since the Israeli army killed eight Palestinians in operations against militants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip within 24 hours last week.

Abdel-Karim Salameh, 11, was hit in the head and killed by Israeli gunfire in the West Bank city of Tulkarm while walking home from school, about 500 metres (yards) from a crowd throwing stones at soldiers, local witnesses said.

Israeli military sources said they had no information on Palestinian casualties there and that troops had used riot dispersal gear against the stone-throwers. Such equipment can include rubber-coated metal bullets that can be lethal.

An Associated Press (AP) cameraman was hit in the back of his head by a bullet when Israeli soldiers opened fire in the Gaza Strip as he was filming a demonstration, Palestinian witnesses said. AP said his condition was not life-threatening.

Witnesses said soldiers shot in the air and at the ground and the bullet that hit him had apparently ricocheted. The army said it was investigating the incident.

An army spokesman said Israeli troops also detained three suspected members of the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad in Dura, a West Bank village from which two gunmen infiltrated a nearby Jewish settlement and killed four seminary students on Friday before soldiers shot them dead.

Islamic Jihad said it carried out that attack in retaliation for the killing of eight Palestinians earlier in the week.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Nablus, a Palestinian bystander was shot dead during a clash between militants within the faction-ridden Fatah movement of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, witnesses said.

Israel's right-wing government signalled the army would strike even harder at militant groups behind violence against its citizens in a more than two-year-old Palestinian uprising against occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

"The defence minister (Shaul Mofaz) and I agreed to apply heavy pressure on the terrorist organisations," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was quoted by a government source as telling his cabinet at a regular meeting on Sunday.

Sharon has made the fight against what he calls Palestinian terrorism his key campaign platform for a January 28 general election.

On Saturday, Israeli soldiers shot dead nine-year-old Hanin Abu Suleiman outside her home in the Gaza town of Khan Younis, Palestinian security sources said.

The PLO's Palestinian Central Council will meet on January 9 for the first time in two years to ratify a draft of a Palestinian constitution including a clause establishing the post of prime minister, a senior Palestinian minister said.

But the premier's position, seen by Western officials as crucial to democratising Palestinian institutions, would not be filled until a Palestinian state was created, cabinet minister Nabil Shaath told Reuters.

He announced a date for the meeting a day after the PLO's executive committee urged the council to discuss a staged peace plan drafted by a quartet of mediators -- the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

A senior Israeli source said Sharon's chief of staff would meet Israeli military and intelligence leaders on Monday to discuss Israeli reservations about the plan, which focus on the sequence of steps to be taken by each side.

An Egyptian government source said Egypt had invited key Palestinian factions to meet in Cairo to forge a united stand on sensitive issues such as a halt to suicide bombings in Israel.

Fatah said it accepted the invitation and militant group Hamas said it agreed in principle to go but ruled out negotiating on a halt to attacks. No date was set for the talks.