Israeli troops backed by tanks and helicopters stormed a prison compound in the West Bank to seize wanted Palestinian militants, sparking an unprecedented wave of hostage-taking in the Gaza Strip.
At least half a dozen hostages, most of them foreigners, were being held in the territory after the raid in the town of Jericho to thwart the release of militants held over the assassination of an Israeli minister five years ago.
The raid, which came minutes after British monitors were withdrawn from the prison, failed to persuade the top wanted militants to surrender, and they instead remained in the prison compound amid an intensifying siege.
A Palestinian security guard was killed and 23 others wounded as gunfire rang out and explosions rocked the area after Israeli forces pushed into the compound that houses the prison in the usually peaceful desert oasis town.
Bulldozers smashed through the compound as Israeli troops called through loudspeakers on Ahmed Saadat, the leader of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and his comrades to surrender.
Around a dozen half-naked men were brought out of the smoke-filled compound by Israeli troops amid intermittent explosions and tank fire. A Palestinian security source said guard Ibrahim Abu al-Amin was shot dead inside the compound by the Israeli troops.
The Palestinian Authority called for an immediate halt to the raid and the Islamist militant movement Hamas urged the international community to intervene.
A senior Israeli officer told reporters that the army would not negotiate with the wanted prisoners.
‘It's very simple, either they give in and get out on their own, or they will be killed,’ he said.
An army spokesman said that 180 Palestinians had been detained in the raid so far but added it had not seized ‘any of those we've come to arrest yet’.
But Saadat voiced defiance as he took refuge in one of the prison buildings along with fellow prisoners and some Palestinian security personnel.
‘Our choice is to fight or to die. We will not surrender,’ he told Al-Jazeera television in a telephone interview.
Saadat and three other PFLP members have been jailed in Jericho, a prison under US and British supervision, since August 2002 after his militant faction claimed the 2001 killing of far-right Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi.
Amid security chaos that threatens to deal a further blow to the moribund peace process, four people, three of them foreigners, were kidnapped at gunpoint from a luxury Palestinian hotel on the Gaza City seafront.
Gunmen also kidnapped the local head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the southern Gaza Strip in an apparent bid to force Israel to halt the Jericho raid.
A leftist militant group close to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Che Guevara Brigades, said it had kidnapped two French women working for medical charity Medecins du Monde in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra said the raid was being undertaken to prevent the militants going free after Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas repeatedly voiced readiness to release them in recent weeks.
‘This operation was ordered by the prime minister in the fight against terrorism. We are committed to the murderers of minister Rehavam Zeevi remaining behind bars,’ he told public radio.
Two days ago, Israel's second television channel reported that Israel was prepared to assassinate the four PFLP militants if they were released.
Mosques across Jericho called on citizens over loudspeakers to flock to the muqataa to protect the soldiers and prisoners inside the compound.
The operation drew a furious response from Hamas's prime minister designate Ismail Haniya who slammed the ‘dangerous escalation’ and warned Israel against any attempt on the life of Saadat and his comrades.
Hamas's overall leader Khaled Meshaal urged the international community to intervene while Abbas said his government was in direct contact with the US and British government.
‘This operation led to regrettable clashes and we hope it will not continue so that we may control the situation,’ Abbas said during a visit to Vienna.
The withdrawal of the three British monitors, part of a team that normally also includes Americans, drew angry accusations of collusion from the Palestinians.
‘For sure America and Britain coordinated with Israel in this aggression against our prisoners and against Jericho in general,’ the speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Aziz Dweik, told AFP.
But a spokeswoman for the British consulate in east Jerusalem denied charges of collusion, insisting the decision had been taken solely for the monitors' safety and had been communicated to Israel and the Palestinians on March 8.
However the explanation and an order by Gaza Strip police chief to open fire on anyone attacking foreign offices failed to prevent angry protests against British and US targets across the Palestinian territories.
In the Gaza Strip, hundreds of armed Palestinians stormed the British cultural centre and set fire to it while gunmen barged into a American office used to teach English in Gaza City.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, an armed offshoot of Abbas's Fatah faction, warned all British and US nationals to leave the territories ‘immediately’ on pain of an ‘unprecedented response’.
Britain meanwhile urged all of its nationals who do not have proper security to leave the Palestinian territories.