Palestinians vow revenge after Israeli strike kills Hamas leaders

Palestinians were today threatening revenge amid world leaders’ condemnation of an Israeli missile attack which killed eight people, including top Islamic militants and two children in the bloodiest day in the region in nearly two months.

Ten Palestinians were killed yesterday and a Palestinian leader said a ceasefire, negotiated last month by CIA director George Tenet but never fully implemented, was over.

Israeli helicopters fired missiles at the building in the West Bank city of Nablus where the militant Islamic Hamas has its headquarters. The attack happened so quickly that Palestinians on the ground did not report seeing the helicopters.

The strike was devastatingly accurate - the missiles crashed through the third-floor windows of the Hamas office so cleanly that the exterior walls were barely damaged.

But the explosions showered the area with shrapnel and debris, and two boys outside the building were killed.

At Nablus hospital, Nadia Khader, 22, could not believe that her two sons, Bilal, eight, and Ashraf, five, had died. "They can’t be dead," she wailed, slapping her own face hysterically.

Hamas threatened revenge. In Gaza, spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin said the "Israeli people should know that they will pay the price, and our blood is not cheap".

Angry Palestinians demonstrated in several places in the West Bank and Gaza, protesting against the Israeli attack and pledging to hit back.

Hussein al-Sheik, a leader of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement in the West Bank, told Israel radio that the ceasefire was over. Arafat’s Palestinian Authority condemned the attack, calling it an "ugly crime" and "official terrorism".

Israeli officials said the main target of the operation was Jamal Mansour, 42, a leading figure in the militant Islamic group that does not accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Israel claimed his team was behind 10 bomb attacks since November, including a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv on June 1 that killed 23 people, most of them Israeli teenagers, and was planning more. Palestinians, however, said he was a political figure.

Two local Hamas leaders, Jamal Salim, 41, and Fahim Dawabshe, 32, were also killed.

The Israeli air strike brought international reproach.

In Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer criticised Israel for violating the ceasefire. The State Department repeated US criticism of Israel’s policy of targeting Palestinian militants.

UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said: "Such actions are almost guaranteed to lead to a further escalation of tension".

Israeli defence minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer expressed regret for the death of innocent civilians but defended the helicopter strike. "Believe me, the attack on the headquarters saved the lives, maybe, of many hundreds," he said.

Raanan Gissin, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, warned that if a large-scale Hamas attack took place, "there’s no Israeli Government in the world that could not respond in harsher measures than the ones we’re using".

In another development, late Tuesday a Palestinian security court in Nablus sentenced three Palestinians to death for helping Israel kill Fatah activist Thabet Thabet last December.

Another man was sentenced to 15 years in prison and a fifth was released.

Arafat will have to approve the death sentences before they could be carried out.