Hit-and-run Palestinian shot dead

The car had been seized from Israeli drivers

A Palestinian man has been shot dead in Tel Aviv after running down an Israeli policeman.

The incident has heightened tensions following a series of militant attacks in Israel, the latest being Sunday's bomb blast in central Jerusalem which killed two people, including the suspected female bomber.

A driver ran over a policeman and dragged him several metres. Police from the nearby police station ran out and shot him

Israeli police spokesman

Palestinian officials have begun vacating buildings in anticipation of an Israeli response to the Jerusalem attack - the third in a week.

Monday's incident began when a Palestinian crashed his Subaru car through an Israeli army road-block outside the West Bank city of Qalqilya.

Having reached the nearby Israeli town of Petah-Tikva, he rammed an Israeli-owned Volvo, which he commandeered when the elderly driver got out inspect the damage.

The Palestinian released the Volvo owner's wife on the way to the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, but then ran down a policeman, dragging him several metres along the road.

"Police from the nearby police station ran out and shot him," police spokesman Gil Kleiman said.

The policeman was in stable condition in hospital.

Eyewitnesses initially said the driver had opened fire on passersby, but police found he was unarmed.

Female attacker

Israel has stepped up security since Sunday's suspected suicide attack in Jerusalem, although officials are hesitating to call the dead Palestinian woman an intentional "martyr".

Hezbollah's Al-Manar television in Lebanon named her as Shinaz Amuri, a female student at Al-Najah University in the West Bank town of Nablus, but neither Israel, nor the Palestinian authorities, have confirmed this.

The last week has seen a return of fear to Israeli streets

Al-Najah's director Rami Hamdullah, told AFP there was no such person on the university's enrolment records.

Israeli police said there was "a host of possibilities" as to how the bomb had gone off on the junction of Jaffa Street and King George Street, killing the woman and an elderly Israeli man.

Soldiers were deployed every few yards along Jaffa Street on Monday, marksmen were stationed on rooftops and police from the anti-terrorism unit cruised up and down the street on motorcycles.

Neither Hamas nor Islamic Jihad militant groups - the usual originators of suicide bomb attacks - have said they were involved. Police speculated that the dead woman might have been delivering a bomb which exploded prematurely.

If she was intending to blow herself up, it would be a first in the 16-month cycle of bloodshed.

Security sources say that would require new measures, such as rebuilding the profile of potential suicide bombers and tightening security checks of women at roadblocks.

More than 30 men, including one Arab Israeli, have blown themselves up during the current conflict, killing dozens of Israelis and wounding hundreds.