Booby trap kills 13 Israeli troops

Thirteen Israeli soldiers were today killed by a booby-trap bomb and scores of Palestinians died in the West Bank city of Jenin in the heaviest fighting seen since Israel invaded the area nearly two weeks ago.

Ariel Sharon, meanwhile, continued to ignore international calls for an Israeli withdrawal by invading two more towns and massing armour on the outskirts of Gaza.

The 13 Israeli soldiers died when they entered a booby-trapped building during an assault on Palestinian militants, an Israeli military source said. It was the single deadliest incident involving Israeli forces in the past 18 months of conflict and took the number of soldiers killed in Jenin in the past two days to 23.

People inside the besieged city said bodies of Palestinians were strewn all over the streets and beginning to rot while hundreds of wounded, including many civilians, were bleeding in their homes, prevented by Israeli troops from getting medical treatment.

Thick smoke hung over the city where hardened guerrillas, many of them rigged with belt bombs, were fighting to the last, pledging that they would rather die than surrender. Palestinian talk of a "massacre" in Jenin has been privately echoed by Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, an Israeli newspaper reported today.

Suggestions Israeli forces could have killed large numbers of innocent people inevitably recall the Sabra Shatilla massacres in Lebanon in 1982 by militia allied to Israeli troops. Prime Minister Sharon, then Israel's defence minister, was censured by an Israeli investigation into the massacre which declared him unfit to hold public office.

Earlier today Israeli troops withdrew from the Palestinian towns of Tulkarm and Qakilya, while others moved into Dura and Hebron. Two days before the arrival in the region of US Secretary of State Colin Powell, a senior British diplomat warned that Israel's moves had not satisfied the demands of the international community for a withdrawal. The British Ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said: "It is not enough in the view of the Security Council, and I don't think it's enough in the view of the United Kingdom."

In Nablus, a French cameraman was this afternoon shot and wounded by an unknown marksman near a refugee camp. The city remained extremely tense even after 500 Palestinians gave themselves up last night. Among them were 200 armed men, the Israeli forces said. But many gunmen remain at large in the city's Balata Camp.

Bethlehem still presents the Israelis with a difficult problem diplomatically and militarily. More than 200 gunmen and some priests have been holed up in the Basilica of the Nativity for a week and Israel has come in for bitter criticism from Britain and the Vatican for allegedly firing into the holy site. Israeli officials are anxious to end the stand-off before it becomes an embarrassing focus of Mr Powell's trip.

? Iran said today it was prepared to join an embargo on oil exports to the West if other Arab nations agree to concerted action. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein yesterday turned off the taps to Western nations in protest at Israeli incursions into Palestinian territory. Until now only Libya had said it was prepared to follow Iraq's lead.