RAMALLAH: Palestinian officials insisted on Saturday that their forces were improving security in the West Bank despite a shootout the day before in which two Israelis and a Palestinian were killed.

“We are investigating what happened yesterday,” Palestinian interior minister Abdelrazak al-Yehya said, adding that the attack took place in an area where Israel is responsible for security.

“The Palestinian Authority is responsible for Area A, in Area B we coordinate with the Israelis, and in Area C Israel has full responsibility,” he said, referring to a system created by the Oslo autonomy accords of the 1990s.

On Friday Palestinian militants opened fire on three Israeli settlers hiking near the southern West Bank city of Hebron, killing two of them.

The two settlers — who were later identified as off-duty soldiers — fired back at the car, killing one Palestinian.

The attack was the deadliest on settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the start of this year, which has seen a sharp fall in attacks against Israelis.

Last month Israel and the Palestinians relaunched Middle East peace talks after a seven-year halt, with Israel pledging to freeze settlements and Palestinians vowing to improve security in the West Bank.

But in a letter to the United Nations on Saturday Israel’s UN ambassador Dan Gillerman said the attack proved that the Palestinian Authority was not doing enough to crack down on armed groups, a foreign ministry official said.

The Palestinian minister for prisoner affairs said Israel was unfairly blaming the Authority for the attack, insisting that Palestinians were living up to their end of last month’s conference at Annapolis near Washington.

“What happened today in Bethlehem is proof that the government is making every effort to provide law and order in Palestinian lands,” Ashraf al-Ajrami said.

Palestinian security forces on Saturday arrested three Israelis — one an off-duty soldier carrying an M-16 — in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, which is off-limits to Israelis.

The three were later handed over to the Israeli army for questioning. Hours earlier Palestinian forces arrested more than a dozen members of the Islamist Hamas movement in raids across the West Bank as part of a crackdown on the group which violently seized power in the Gaza Strip in June.

The Palestinians are also planning to beef up their forces with the import of 50 Russian-made armoured personnel carriers in the coming month, Yehya said, adding that they would “only be used to transport soldiers.” Israel held up the delivery of the vehicles earlier this month when Palestinians asked that the vehicles be armed with heavy machine-guns.

But Ajrami said that despite the new equipment Palestinian forces cannot guarantee security across the West Bank because they can only operate in certain areas.

“Until now Israel has not permitted the government to operate in all parts of the West Bank to break up armed cells, even though the government has made real progress in this area,” Ajrami said.

“Because Israel does not allow us to go into certain areas they are responsible for those areas.”—AFP