Israeli forces have killed at least six Palestinians, including one in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip, in the worst flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian fighting in weeks.
The Israeli army said the air strike, only the second in Gaza since a November truce, targeted militants who had fired makeshift rockets at the Israeli border town of Sderot.
A top aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the Israeli actions jeopardised Abbas's efforts to expand the fragile truce from Gaza to the occupied West Bank as part of a U.S.-led peace push.
In the most deadly incident an Israeli undercover unit killed three armed militants while they were driving in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, local Palestinian security sources said.
In a village near Jenin, a Palestinian policeman was also shot and killed by Israeli forces, Palestinians witnesses said.
They said the policeman was shot when he peered out of his window and had not been involved in any fighting in the area.
The Israeli army said its troops 'noticed an armed militant firing from the top of a building and identified hitting him.'
Later in the day, a 17-year-old Palestinian girl was shot dead by Israeli troops as she stood at her window in Jenin refugee camp, Palestinian medical workers said.
Palestinian militants in Gaza responded to the West Bank killings by firing at least three rockets at Sderot.
An Israeli ambulance service said two people in the Israeli town which lies close to the border with Gaza were treated for light injuries.
The Islamic Jihad militant group said a 45-year-old man was killed in the Israeli air strike. The group described him as a civilian but said he was riding in a car with two other militants, who were seriously wounded.
A top Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, former foreign minister Mahmoud a-Zahar, seized on the Israeli actions and vowed the militant group, which leads the Palestinian government, would continue to fight Israel until 'the liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine.'
