The New Year began with four more deaths in the West Bank, including a 12-year-old boy caught in a gun battle and two Palestinian policemen who were allegedly tortured before being killed.
The fourth man killed was a Palestinian gunned down in a drive-by shooting blamed on Israeli settlers, just one day after an extremist settler leader and his wife died when their car was ambushed.
Moaz Wahdan, 12, died in Ali hospital in Hebron where he had been taken Sunday with serious wounds sustained in a clash in which two other Palestinians were hurt.
Hospital officials said he was not taking part in the battle in the flashpoint city, where Israeli soldiers protect colonies of hard-line Jewish settlers.
The Palestinian policemen were killed at Tulkarem in the northern part of the West Bank.
Hospital officials said the bodies of Tareq Ibrahim Kato, 30, and Mwataz al-Sruji, 37, were unclothed and showed signs of torture.
The head of West Bank Palestinian hospital services, Musa Abu Hmeid, told AFP the two men's hands had been mutilated and they had apparently been summarily executed.
An Israeli military spokesman professed ignorance of how the men died, saying only that there had been heavy exchanges of fire overnight in the area.
Tahrir Rizek, 22, died in a Jerusalem hospital after occupants of one of two civilian cars opened fire in the Arab village of Hizma, north east of Jerusalem, medical officials and Israeli public radio reported.
The four deaths brought the toll to 366, mainly Palestinians, since the Intifada, or uprising against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, started September 28. Thousands more have been wounded -- NABLUS, West Bank (AFP)
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