Palestinian militants ambushed an Israeli army jeep in Gaza Wednesday, killing a Jewish settler, wounding three soldiers and challenging new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's opposition to attacks on Israeli targets. 

The Islamic Jihad said the raid, the first since Abbas won a landslide election on Sunday, was a riposte to his calls for an end to four years of armed struggle in favor of non-violent means to achieve a state in Israeli-occupied territories.

Israeli soldiers also shot dead two wanted militants in its first raid since the vote for a successor to Yasser Arafat. At the urging of US-led mediators, Israel had suspended military action against militants to safeguard the election.

Yesterday's killings threatened a relapse into what has been an intractable cycle of violence that could stall fresh, internationally backed momentum towards peace negotiations, frozen since 2000.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza withdrawal plan, which mediators see as a precursor to peace but settlers vow to resist, received a boost when their rightist political patrons failed to muster enough votes to stop parliament's initial passage of the 2005 state budget yesterday.

Sharon's new "unity" coalition with the dovish opposition Labor Party, formed to restore a majority for the Gaza pullout, would have been badly weakened if he had lost the budget vote.

Islamist militants behind the ambush on the jeep boycotted the election and have spurned Abbas's appeals for a ceasefire, a precondition for the "roadmap" process towards a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel.

Three militants cut through a security fence ringing the Jewish enclave of Morag and planted bombs on a patrol road before the jeep approached, an army spokesman said.

Two of the militants left while the third stayed to detonate the bombs and open fire as the jeep came by, killing a 28-year-old settler and wounding three soldiers, one an officer, he said. The militant was killed by return fire.

"Our heroic attack today responds to those who describe such attacks as the smaller jihad that must end," Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Abdallah said. "It will never end until Palestine is returned, through the barrel of our guns."

Sharon phoned Abbas on Tuesday to congratulate him on his election victory in the highest-level contact between the sides in nearly four years.

(China Daily January 13, 2005)