( dpa ) - Israeli soldiers killed a senior Islamic Jihad commander during an arrest raid in the northern West Bank Wednesday, Palestinian medical officials said.
A large Israeli army unit raided the village of Sida, north of Tulkarm, to arrest Saleh Karkour, the Tulkarm leader of the al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the radical Islamic Jihad movement.
Karkour, in his mid-20s and from the nearby village of Attil, had been wanted by the Israeli army for several years.
The Israeli troops surrounded a house he was holed up in and called on him to turn himself in. When he did not, the Israeli military shelled the building and used a bulldozer to demolish it, as Karkour opened fire and hurled explosives from inside.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said the troops returned fire and "identified a hit." They later found several more explosives, a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a number of magazines on his body, she said.
The incident comes as Egypt is trying to broker a truce between Israel and armed Palestinian factions, which have stepped down their rocket attacks from Gaza over the past days as Israel has scaled down its military operations in the Strip.
The relative calm comes after five days of the deadliest fighting between Israel and local militants in Gaza in 40 years left more than 125 Palestinians dead early this and late last month.
The Islamic Jihad issued a statement Wednesday vowing revenge for the death of their Tulkarm leader. "The retaliation will be in the depth of the Zionist entity, God willing," it warned.
The radical opposition faction has been at the forefront of the almost daily rocket attacks from Gaza at southern Israel, producing its own al-Quds rockets.
Despite the threat of revenge, a senior Islamic Jihad political leader in Gaza told reporters Egypt would host ceasefire talks with all Palestinian militants factions in Cairo before the end of March.
Cairo was expected to issue invitations next week to the militant factions, including to the radical Islamic Hamas movement in control of Gaza, the rival Fatah party of President Mahmoud Abbas, as well as the Islamic Jihad.
The talks would also attempt to renew contacts between Hamas and Abbas of Fatah, which were cut off following Hamas' violent take-over of Gaza in June, Naffez Azzam said.
Israel, meanwhile, said the Islamic Jihad leader killed near Tulkarm had been arrested by it already in 1998, but was released about a year later, after he which he returned to militant activity.
Karkour was arrested again in January 2002 following a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv which injured 23 Israelis. He confessed to having accommodated the two bombers at his house and to his involvement in recruiting suicide bombers, a military statement said.
Karkour was sentenced and jailed, but again returned to militant activity on behalf of the Islamic Jihad, it added. The militant cell he helped establish, among others, carried out a suicide bombing at an Israeli military roadblock in the West Bank in July, the army said.