Israeli officials have acknowledged that they had ordered soldiers to arrest the three Palestinians who were shot dead in Nablus last week.

The order for the Duvdevan commando unit clearly stated that the aim of the attack was to capture Adnan Subuh, Raad Sarkaji and Ghassan Abu Sheikh, Israeli sources said.

The Israeli forces received the written order several hours before raiding the occupied West Bank homes of the Palestinian trio.

According to eyewitnesses, the three Palestinian victims were executed on the spot.

Meanwhile, the witnesses also believe that Israeli claims that the victims were involved in the killing of the Rabbi are baseless fabrications.

The victims were members of the Fatah Movement, led by acting Palestinian Authority Chief Mahmoud Abbas.

Palestinian sources reported today morning that the Zionist forces near Biet Hanoun city north of Gaza strip killed three Palestinian civilians; the sources added that a fourth one survived.

Eyewitnesses said that the Zionist forces killed the three Palestinians and prevented the Palestinian ambulances from giving the first aid to the Palestinians, they bled to death.

Eyewitnesses added that the Palestinians were looking in the remains of buildings near Biet Hanoun crossings.

In the same context, Zionist forces stormed the Old City of Nablus in the early hours of Saturday morning raiding several homes and killing three men affiliated with Fatah’s military wing the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

Sources said two of the men were “killed in cold blood” by soldiers in their homes in the Old City. The two were identified as 38-year-old Raed Sukarji, and Ghassan Abu Sharekh whose brother Nayif was a former leader of the Al-Aqsa Brigades in Nablus & was killed by the Zionist army several years ago.

Deputy Governor of Nablus Anan Al-Atira confirmed that Anan Subih, 33, was also killed. She said Subih was a former Al-Aqsa Brigades fighter who had received full amnesty from Zionist entity after he turned in his weapons, signed a form swearing to renounce violence and spending months in Palestinian police protective custody while Zionist entity okayed the deal.

Sukarji and Abu Sharekh were evacuated to the Rafidia Hospital with several bullet wounds each in the chest. Sukarji’s wife was also taken to hospital to be treated for shrapnel injury to her legs. Zionist forces imposed a curfew on the Ras Al-A’ein neighborhood before dawn, closed off all the exits from the Old City and laid siege to the home of the Sukarji home.

Director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committees in Nablus Ghassan Hamdan said that three Palestinian homes were besieged in the raid. He confirmed that Sukarji was shot in the head and chest “before the very eyes of his wife.” While the second man, Abu Sharekh, was removed from his home and shot outside.

Sukarji’s niece, 20-year-old Hind, said that “Zionist forces ransacked Raed Sukarji’s home and shot him in front of his pregnant wife and two children, when his wife Tahani, 30, tried to defend him, she was shot in the feet.” She also noted that her uncle had been released from Zionist jail in January 2009, and that he was on the waiting list for enrolment in the Palestinian Authority security services.

The home of Anan Subih in Ras El’ein was the third targeted location, where troops reportedly opened fire randomly on the building before entering.

Eyewitnesses described the siege launched on Ksheikiyya Street in the Ras El’ein neighborhood where Anan Subih lives. Subih was an officer in the Palestinian Authority in Nablus.

“Dozens of Zionist soldiers ransacked Anan’s home at 3:00am firing gunshots and grenades, causing a fire to break out in the next warehouse for plastic chairs. The soldiers entered the building & demanding Anan, and when we told them he was at work with the security forces the soldiers evacuated all nine families who live in the building. We were gathered at the nearby home of the Al-‘Amoudi family,” Anan’s brother Nidal said. Witnesses added that Zionist forces did not allow Palestinian fire fighters to access the area and put out the blaze.

[OPT: Occupied Palestinian territory]

Palestinian settlement monitoring authorities say a group of extremist Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinian olive farms in the north of the occupied West Bank.

Residents from the notorious Yitzhar settlement, near the city of Nablus, destroyed the trees in the village of Burin some 150 meters (yards) from their settlement on Thursday morning.

Palestinian official Ghassan Douglas, who holds the settlement portfolio for the northern West Bank, said the Israeli assailants destroyed 81 olive trees on the property of Akram Amran, Ma’an news agency reported.

Douglas condemned the destruction as ‘provocative and unacceptable’.

Yitzhar is among the most hardline settlements in the West Bank, whose ultra-Orthodox residents claim a God-given, biblical right to the land and frequently harass Palestinians living in the area.

This is while a rabbi who runs an Orthodox Jewish school in the settlement has endorsed the killing of any non-Jew, including children and babies, who pose a threat to Israel.

“Children should not be exempt from this fate. There is a reasonable explanation for killing infants if it is clear that they will grow up to hurt us, and in this situation, the strike should be directed at them,” Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro advised in his book The King’s Torah.

The book includes endorsements from leading Jewish spiritual authorities in the West Bank.

Israeli activists acknowledge the extremist thinking in the book is quite widespread among settlers as a number of them have a deeply racist philosophy against any non-Jews, and especially against Palestinians and other Arabs.

Dr. Ahmed Bahar, the first deputy speaker of the Palestinian legislative council, stated Tuesday that holding any Palestinian elections needs national consensus away from the Zio-American dictates.

“We want elections and not elections according to the American demand that yield forged and fabricated results,” Dr. Bahar stressed during a popular meeting held in Jabaliya, north of Gaza Strip, in support of the Aqsa Mosque.

The deputy speaker underlined in another context that the occupied city of Jerusalem is exposed to a fierce Judaization campaign targeting the presence of Palestinians and the Islamic holy places.

He added that the people of Jerusalem need serious Arab and Muslim support to save the remaining Palestinian homes in their city and protect the Aqsa Mosque against Israeli attempts to attack it.

In another context, Abdelsattar Qassem, a political science professor in Al-Najah national university in Nablus, stated that the edict issued by Mahmoud Abbas to hold elections next January is illegal because he and the Palestine liberation organization (PLO) have no legitimacy.

Qassem added that Abbas’s elections would not resolve the problems in the Palestinian arena and would further strain the situation.

He also said that if Abbas was serious about the election, he has to give guarantees first that the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah would accept the results, questioning the reason that would prompt the PA to accept the results of new elections, while it had already rejected the last ones.

Commenting on the inter-Palestinian reconciliation, the professor underlined that Egypt is not eligible for mediating between the Palestinian rivals or providing a fair solution to their problems because it is biased in favor of the Zio-American project.

Jewish fanatic settlers on Saturday night assaulted Palestinian citizens in Iraq Burin village, south of Nablus city, local sources reported.

They noted that Israeli occupation forces (IOF) arrived to the scene and fired rubber bullets and gas canisters at the citizens wounding one of them in his foot before arresting another.

The villagers threw stones and empty bottle on the IOF troops.

Meanwhile, in Al-Khalil district, the IOF soldiers severely beat up a 13-year-old Palestinian boy near Kiryat Arba settlement on Saturday night.

Locals said that the child Mohammed Da’na was hospitalized.

In the Gaza Strip, Zionist soldiers fired at and detained a Palestinian man northwest of Beit Lahia town to the north of the Strip afternoon Saturday.

Zionist occupation forces launched a large-scale arrest campaign in the Nablus district at dawn Wednesday that ended with the detention of 14 Palestinians after breaking into tens of civilian homes.

Zionist forces command said that the soldiers detained 15 “wanted activists” in the West Bank including 14 in Nablus and that firebombs were found in a number of their homes and were destroyed.

Also in a Nablus village, the Zionist troops escorted tens of Jewish settlers during their attack on Palestinian farmers while harvesting their olive crops on Tuesday.

Local sources in Qaryut village said that the settlers from the nearby settlement of Shavot Rahel assaulted the farmers while reaping their crops injuring a number of them.

They noted that the farmers went to their fields after coordination between the Palestinian and Israeli sides, but the settlers attacked the farmers and prevented them from harvesting their crops.

Settlers arriving in 70 cars threw stones at the Muslim farmers in the presence of the IOF soldiers who did nothing to stop the attack on the unarmed farmers.

The Israeli military has invaded Palestinian towns in the West Bank, forcibly entering homes and ransacking them while arresting scores of civilians.

Targeting West Bank communities, Israeli troops on Sunday searched and raided homes in the al-Jalazon refugee camp near the central West Bank city of Ramallah as well as the city of Nablus in the northern West Bank and kidnapped four civilians, witnesses said.

Local sources said that the Israeli military radio had said that troops captured the men and took them to detention camps for questioning.

Meanwhile, a group of Israeli settlers escorted by Israeli troops on Sunday afternoon attacked and took over a Palestinian owned house in East Jerusalem (al-Quds) and kidnapped 12 people who tried to stop the attack.

When the home owners of Sheik Jarrah neighborhood and their international supporters tried to stop them, soldiers attacked the residents, witnesses added.

As residents managed to move settlers off a piece of land, other settlers occupied a nearby house and police then arrested 11 international supporters and a Palestinian official, Hateem Abed al-Qader.