Middle East violence greets New Year

Fierce gunbattles raged through the night in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, killing two Palestinian policemen near the West Bank town of Tulkarm.

Palestinian sources say the bodies of the two men, who had been guarding a police outpost on the edge of the town, were discovered riddled with bullets.

The Israeli army said it had come under fire in a dozen locations. Earlier, the Palestinians reported that a villager had died from his wounds after being shot by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and a four-year-old boy had also been killed as a result of Israeli shelling in the area of Nablus. Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction has called for protests to be intensified today Mon to mark the thirty-sixth anniversary of the group's founding.

Yesterday, mourners at the funeral of a prominent leader of the extremist Jewish settler movement, Binyamin Kahane, and his wife -- who were killed in an ambush early on Sunday -- rampaged through Jerusalem chanting 'death to the Arabs', and demanding revenge.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service