Children killed in Israeli helicopter strike

Combat helicopters killed five people, including two children, by blasting missiles into a Palestinian car on the West Bank in one of Israel's largest assassination operations for weeks, said witnesses.

Palestinian officials and bystanders said that a boy and a girl, both thought to be nine, who had been standing near the vehicle were among the dead, adding yet more infant names to the long list of uninvolved juveniles killed in Israeli military operations.

At Tubus, a village 12 miles south of Jenin, one of the three dead men was reported to be Rafat Daraghmeh, a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades whom Israeli agents were hunting. The car was reportedly hit by three missiles. The other two men were also said to be militant activists.

The death of the children comes a month after an Israeli F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on a residential area in the Gaza Strip, killing 15, including nine children and a Hamas commander. That attack drew revenge attacks by Hamas. The Israeli armed forces also arrested the Hamas leader, Hasan Yousef.

Palestinian officials say Israel has continued its attacks – including killing a family of four at a fruit-pickers' camp in Gaza last week with an exploding tank shell packed with tiny metal arrows – at a time when it is claiming to be seeking to restore calm having staged a withdrawal plan.

The killings may fuel bloody internal divisions in the West Bank over the role of collaborators, who have supplied information helpful to Israel's death squads. This weekend militia shot a 20-year-old woman for allegedly feeding information to Israel's armed forces. She was the second Palestinian woman to be murdered during the intifada over such accusations. Her killers, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, shot dead her aunt, aged 36, in the same town, Tulkarm, a week ago after torturing her son into implicating her.

Reports said the Al-Aqsa Brigades abducted Rajah Ibrahim after reports that she met an Israeli squad who gave her a bomb to plant, killing the militia's Tulkarm leader, Ra'ed Karmi. Yesterday the fate of her kidnapped brother, Alla, was unclear.

The killings of "collaborators" have been denounced by the Palestinian leadership, though Palestinian Authority officials say they are powerless to stop them. Last week Yasser Arafat signalled his disapproval by publicly clearing the name of one lynched man, Ibrahim Abdo.

The governor of Tulkarm, Issadin al-Sharif, told The Independent yesterday that he strongly condemned the woman's murder, describing her killers as "the thieves and the scum of our society." He could not stop the incidents because of his police curfew.