Palestinian dies in Hebron blast

People helped each other out of the building

At least one Palestinian has been killed and eight were injured in an explosion in the West Bank town of Hebron on Friday.

The circumstances of the incident are not clear, with Israeli and Palestinian sources giving conflicting accounts.

Palestinians said the local office of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement was shelled by Israeli forces, while Israeli security sources suggested a bomb had exploded while a militant worked on it.

The blast happened as Palestinian and Israeli groups openly urged attacks on each other.

Israeli denial

The Palestinian security chief in the West Bank, Jibril Rajoub, told the BBC that the people in the building were civilians, but Israel says the man killed was a member of the militant Palestinian Tanzim faction.

Diya Tmaizi is believed to be the youngest victim

Israeli security officials denied any role in the incident.

Army sources quoted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said the blast must have been caused by a "work accident" when Palestinians were trying to assemble a bomb.

There were reports of gun battles between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians near Jerusalem in the wake of the Hebron explosion.

Shooting victims buried

The latest violence came after Palestinians mourned a three-month-old baby and two men killed in a shooting attack near Hebron on Thursday.

Mr Sharon vowed to pursue the killers

About 1,000 mourners chanted "Death to the settlers". The infant's mother, Rima Tmaizi, 28, said she was "sure our people will take revenge for him".

An outlawed Jewish extremist group has said it carried out the killings, which have been condemned by the Israeli Government and international leaders.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office issued a statement vowing to "do everything possible to apprehend those responsible" and "condemning all forms of terror".

A militant Jewish group has reportedly placed an inflammatory advertisement in an Israeli newspaper, appealing to readers to do what it called the moral thing, and kill Arafat, the BBC's Frank Gardner in Jerusalem reports.

For its part a militant Palestinian group has been handing out leaflets saying it would teach what it called the Zionist enemy a lesson it would never forget.

Committee for Road Safety

The three Palestinians shot dead on Thursday were reportedly driving back from a wedding when their vehicle was overtaken by a white car, whose occupants opened fire.

A group calling itself the Committee for Road Safety, reported to be Jewish extremists with a record of activities since 1989, said in a statement that it had carried out the attack.

Diya Tmaizi, the three-month old baby boy who died, was buried in his home village of Idna.

He is thought to be the youngest person to have been killed in the past 10 months of violence, which has claimed the lives of at least 489 Palestinians, 128 Israelis and 13 Israeli Arabs.