In al-Jalazoun refugee camp, near the de facto Palestinian capital
of Ramallah, Palestinians threw rocks at Israeli troops and army
gunfire killed a 20-year-old Palestinian and wounded another,
hospital officials said.
Israel says members of Hamas, which signed a unity deal with
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in April, kidnapped the three
seminary students. They disappeared on Thursday after leaving a
Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, chief of Israel's armed forces, said
the military was preparing to expand its operation.
"We have a goal, and that is to find these three boys and bring them
home, and to hit Hamas as hard as possible - and that is what we are
going to do," Gantz said in broadcast comments, at a meeting with
army officers.
"We are on our way toward a significant campaign. We will get our
plans in order."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who broke off peace talks with
Abbas after the Palestinian reconciliation pact, held a rare
telephone conversation with the Western-backed Palestinian leader on
Monday.
The prime minister's office said in a statement that Netanyahu told
Abbas he expected him to help in efforts to find Gil-Ad Shaer and
U.S.-Israeli national Naftali Frankel, both 16, and Eyal Yifrah, 19.
ABBAS CONDEMNS KIDNAPPING, ISRAELI RESPONSE
In a separate statement, Abbas's office said the "Palestinian
presidency condemns ... the kidnapping of three Israeli boys and the
series of Israeli violations" - a reference to Israeli military
raids and arrests.
Israeli officials have already cited security coordination with
Abbas's Palestinian Authority in the search for the three.
Hamas, which advocates Israel's destruction, called such cooperation
a "poisonous knife in the back of our people". Netanyahu has said
Hamas members kidnapped the teenagers, an allegation the group has
neither confirmed nor denied.
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Israeli troops conducted predawn door-to-door searches in six
Palestinian towns on Monday, witnesses said.
The Israeli military said some more 40 Palestinians, including
"Hamas leadership and operatives", were arrested in the West Bank,
raising to about 150 the number of people detained since Thursday.
Witnesses said several Palestinian lawmakers from Hamas, including
parliament speaker Aziz Dweik, were taken into custody. The
legislature has not convened since 2007 amid a rift between Hamas,
which seized the Gaza Strip that year, and Abbas's Fatah movement.
Most of the military efforts have been concentrated in the West Bank
Palestinian city of Hebron, a Hamas stronghold, and Netanyahu was to
convene his security cabinet later on Monday.
An Israeli government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity,
said Israel was looking to leverage the search into a wider
clampdown on Hamas in the West Bank and was also looking at legal
aspects of deporting West Bank Hamas leaders to Gaza.
(Writing by Maayan Lubell; Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi
in Gaza; Editing by Jeffrey Heller)
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