(AFP)
JERUSALEM - Washington has questioned Israel over a deadly West Bank raid over the weekend that killed three members of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah movement, an Israeli official said on Sunday.
Washington has passed on the Palestinians' concerns over why the raid was carried out without their forces being given an opportunity to arrest the men, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Israel said the three men shot dead in Nablus on Saturday were behind the killing of a settler in the occupied West Bank two days earlier who was ambushed on a road and had his car sprayed with bullets.
But the military confirmed that none of the Palestinians fired any shots at the troops that came to arrest them at three different locations and said only one of them was armed.
Family members of the three men said the troops entered without warning and killed all three in cold blood, insisting none had resisted arrest.
One of the men was a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a militant group loosely linked with Abbas's Fatah movement, and the other two were Fatah activists, Palestinian security officials said.
Israel said that it had notified Palestinian security forces just before the raid was carried out, but the Western-backed Palestinian Authority said the operation dealt a blow to its own efforts to maintain security.
A US official quoted by the left-leaning Haaretz daily also said on Sunday that Washington had contacted Uzi Arad, a senior aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over the incident.
"We expressed our concern and encouraged both sides to continue their security cooperation," he was quoted as saying.
"We talked to both sides in order to get full information about what happened," he added.
Netanyahu meanwhile praised the commando operation on Sunday, telling the cabinet that Israel would "continue to defend aggressively and respond to every attack against Israeli citizens and every rocket strike."
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