JERUSALEM Israelis re-enter Nablus, assign curfew for Palestinian militants

Israeli soldiers destroyed a weapons-smuggling tunnel in the area last week.
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli forces re-entered Nablus early today, exchanging gunfire with Palestinian militants and clamping a curfew on the heavily populated ancient quarter of the West Bank city, Palestinian witnesses said.
Israeli forces had pulled out of Nablus on Monday after a two-week operation -- focused around the Balata refugee camp -- in which soldiers arrested dozens of suspected militants. The army says Nablus is a center of militant activity.
Early today, the troops moved into Nablus' Old City, forcing about 40,000 people to stay in their homes and keeping schoolchildren at home, the witnesses said. Troops forced residents out of their homes to conduct searches, they added.
No casualties were reported in the gunfights.
An army spokesman said the "terror infrastructure" was continuing to operate in Nablus. He said one suspect had been arrested overnight.
The ongoing sweep is one of the largest Israeli military raids in the West Bank in recent months, reflecting Israeli policy to go after suspected Palestinian militants in the absence of Palestinian efforts to crack down on violent groups.
In a two-day operation in the Rafah refugee camp on the Gaza-Egypt border last week, Israeli soldiers destroyed a weapons-smuggling tunnel and killed nine Palestinians in exchanges of fire.
Road map plan
The unrelenting violence has frozen efforts to implement the road map, an internationally backed plan to end three years of bloody violence and to move toward a Palestinian state in 2005.
The road map plan requires the Palestinians to dismantle groups responsible for three years of attacks against Israelis.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia has resisted a crackdown on the militants, instead seeking a truce agreement with the militants, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Despite Egyptian help, so far he has not succeeded.
In Nablus, residents said the Israeli troops left at dawn Monday, releasing a curfew that had confined many of the 150,000 residents of the West Bank's largest city to their homes for a week.
The searches at first concentrated on the Balata refugee camp next to the city but widened after a suicide bomber from a nearby village blew himself up at a bus stop near Tel Aviv on Thursday, killing four Israelis.
Palestinians demand that Israel stop its raids on their cities and towns, charging that innocent people are killed or injured and that entire populations are subjected to collective punishment in the form of curfews.