A Palestinian intelligence officer died Saturday of serious wounds he sustained when his car exploded Gaza City in what Palestinian officials described as an assassination attempt by Israel.
Tayssir Khattab's car blew up as he was driving to his Gaza City office, Palestinian sources said.
His car blew up as he was driving to his Gaza City office, the same sources said.
His bodyguard was also badly wounded in the blast, they added.
According to the first results of the investigation, a bomb had been placed in the car.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian news agency, WAFA, reported that Israeli tanks shelled PA national posts and residential areas in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
No immediate reports of injuries.
The agency said that the shelling targeted a hotel in northern El-Beireh, adding that several area were destroyed around the area.
The new Israeli attacks came amid preparations to lay the groundwork for a meeting between Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in a bid to end nearly a year of bloodshed.
Witnesses said Israeli troops and tanks stormed into Palestinian sectors of divided Hebron in the West Bank late Friday evening and took up two positions after a day of gunbattles that left five Palestinians wounded.
The fragile hopes for peace were also marked by an angry speech from Arafat in South Africa, where he used the stage of an international conference on racism to blast the Jewish state and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said AFP.
An Israeli army spokesman denied that Israeli troops had made another incursion into Palestinian Hebron, a flashpoint city that has seen some of the worst violence of the 11-month Palestinian uprising.
The witnesses said Israeli forces went as deep as 200 meters (yards) into Palestinian neighborhoods, less than two days after Israel took control of a Palestinian town on the outskirts of Jerusalem for around 48 hours.
The pullout from Beit Jala on Thursday, after Israel came under heavy international criticism, was thought to be a signal that expected talks between Peres and Arafat could break the cycle of violence.
Israel five years ago handed over 80 percent of Hebron, where some 400 Jewish settlers live under heavy protection amid 120,000 Palestinian residents.
The latest Hebron clashes erupted following the funeral of a Palestinian doctor killed by Israeli fire on Thursday.
Israeli radio reported the government was in regular contact with Egypt, one of only two nations to have a peace treaty with Israel, to work out the details for a Peres-Arafat meeting.
Palestinian official Suleiman al-Hersee, with Arafat for the UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, confirmed talks were underway to work on the details for the meeting, which he warned would be fruitless unless Peres had free rein from Sharon, whom Arafat accused of being a “racist.”
"Our tortured Palestinian people, faced with this harsh treatment, with this settler colonization and racial discrimination, look to this conference to stand by us, to stand by justice, by international legitimacy which is now being trodden upon by the Israeli government," he told AFP.
He said the "objective" of the Sharon government was "to deprive our people, to force us to our knees in order to continue and perpetrate occupation and racial discrimination."
"This brutality and this arrogance is moved by a supremacist mentality, a mentality of racial discrimination," Arafat said.
Previous talks have failed to bring an end to the fighting which has left more than 750 people dead since last September, when the Palestinian uprising began after a stall in negotiations.
Arafat again reiterated in Durban that the Palestinians want the holy city as the capital of any future Palestinian state, underscoring one of the most emotional and thorny issues on which earlier talks ran aground.
The Middle East has featured high on the agenda of the UN conference, where US Secretary of State Colin Powell is absent because of Washington's unhappiness with anti-Israeli language being pushed by Arab states.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in his opening speech, called the Holocaust "the ultimate abomination" and denounced "indiscriminate and totally unacceptable" attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinian militants.
But he also won applause by outlining a list of wrongs done to Palestinians -- displacement, occupation, blockade, and now extra-judicial killings," AFP said.
Mid-ranking diplomats from Washington, Israel's biggest ally with some three billion dollars in annual aid, are attending the conference but are under orders not to speak. Israel also sent a lower-level delegation.
A senior State Department official said in Washington on Friday that the US team could be brought home before the gathering's end if anti-Israeli language stays in the program.
In earlier incidents Friday, nine Palestinians were wounded in the Gaza Strip, three of them seriously, when gunbattles erupted after another brief Israeli incursion into the border town of Rafah.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, a top leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), best known by his nom de guerre of Abu Leila, claimed Israel tried to assassinate him when an explosion tore through his home.
Israel denied any knowledge of the incident, and Palestinian witnesses also cast doubt on the claim.
More than 50 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli hunt-and-kill attacks which the Jewish state calls "active self-defense," according to AFP.
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