AL QUDS, April 23: Israeli soldiers killed six Palestinians, including two small girls, during a shootout and a chase in the West Bank on Friday and overnight clashes in Gaza.

The deaths came as tension in the area remained high, a week after Israel's assassination of Abdel Aziz Ranteesi, the Gaza leader of the radical Islamic Hamas movement, in Gaza City.

Since the assassination last Saturday night, 27 Palestinians have been killed, most during Israeli attacks in the northern Gaza Strip between local militants and an Israeli armoured force which had entered the area to stop intensified rocket fire from it.

The latest killed on Friday was a man shot during a firefight near the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Israeli military sources said Israeli soldiers encountered three armed Hamas militants in a field outside the village of Tallouza, who opened fire.

The soldiers returned fire, killing one of the gunmen and injuring another. They launched a hunt for the third one, who fled into the village. Ambulance personnel on the other hand said the dead man's family, who called them, told them that the fatality was a university tutor who had no relations to Hamas.

Residents said he was outside his house when the soldiers shot him, possibly when he got scared and ran. Israeli soldiers earlier killed three leading members of the militant al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Qalqilya, some 25 kilometres west of Nablus. A fourth was critically injured.

A force had entered the town in search of the four, found them in the centre and called on them to freeze, but the wanted men fled. The soldiers chased after them and opened fire, killing three.

Military sources said the Al Aqsa cell had been in the midst of planning two suicide bombings, one of them in the nearby settlement of Karnei Shomron. Two Palestinian girls aged four and seven were also reported killed during clashes late Thursday in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya, one by a live bullet, the other from tear gas inhalation.

The clashes erupted after the Israeli army had pulled out most of its troops from the village, but left behind one unit to guard what the army said was an area from where local militants had been launching rockets at nearby Israeli targets.

Hundreds of Palestinians confronted the unit, throwing stones and fire bombs at it, the army spokesman said. He said armed gunmen also fired grenades, an anti-tank missile and semi-automatic assault rifles from within the crowd.

The soldiers used tear gas to disperse the crowd, which he said also contained young children, and returned "precise fire" at the gunmen and at one Palestinian who climbed on a military vehicle and tried to get to the driver's weapon and ammunition. The army said it recognized hits of three gunmen and was checking the charges that two girls were killed. -dpa