Violence breaks out after settlement evacuations

? An Israeli military raid on a West Bank refugee camp left four militants dead Wednesday and an Orthodox Jewish man was stabbed to death in Jerusalem – an eruption of violence a day after Israel completed its evacuation of 25 settlements.

At the Tulkarem refugee camp, Israeli soldiers surrounded a house and exchanged fire with militants inside and outside, witnesses said.

The bodies of the four dead were brought to the Tulkarem hospital an hour after the incident. Residents said they were members of Islamic Jihad. Two other Palestinians were wounded, they said.

Earlier in Jerusalem, a Palestinian stabbed two young ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Old City, police said, calling it a terror attack. One of the victims later died of his wounds. The assailant escaped.

A Palestinian man holds the Palestinian flag as he looks toward the evacuated Jewish settlement of Ganim, in the northern West Bank. Bulldozers on Wednesday leveled homes in Ganim and Kadim, the first demolitions in the West Bank after settlers left Tuesday.

Israeli media reported that the dead man was a young seminary student from Britain. His name was not released.

Also Wednesday, the Justice Ministry said Israel issued orders to seize Palestinian land to build its separation barrier along a route that would effectively annex the West Bank’s largest Jewish settlement to Jerusalem.

Palestinians objected to the seizure, and said that the barrier would cut them off from the part of Jerusalem they claim for a state and reinforce Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s intention to solidify Israel’s grip on its main West Bank settlement blocs after the pullout from the all 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank.

The settlement, Maaleh Adumim, three miles east of Jerusalem in the Judean desert, has about 30,000 residents.

Israel says the barrier is needed to keep suicide bombers from entering the country. When complete, the 425-mile complex of walls, electric fences, trenches and barbed wire is expected to include about 8 percent of the West Bank on the “Israeli” side.