Israel Detains Hamas Ministers

Israeli troops today arrested dozens of Hamas ministers and MPs as they stepped up attempts to free a soldier kidnapped by militants in Gaza at the weekend.

The Israeli army said 64 Hamas officials, including seven ministers and 20 other MPs, had been detained in a series of early morning arrests.

Abdel Aziz Duaik, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament, and the religious affairs minister, Nayef Rajoub, were among those held.

"The arrests of these Hamas officials ... is part of a campaign against a terrorist organisation that has escalated its war of terror against Israeli civilians," the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, said.

The Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, an ally of the president, Mahmoud Abbas, condemned the arrests.

"We have no government, we have nothing. They have all been taken," he said. "This is absolutely unacceptable, and we demand their release immediately."

The kidnap of Corporal Gilad Shalit happened at the weekend, when Palestinian militants, including members of Hamas, tunnelled into Israeli territory and engaged in a fierce gun battle which left two people dead on either side.

It has brought the Israelis and the Palestinians closer to war than at any time in more than a year.

Israeli tanks yesterday rolled into the Gaza Strip for the first time since the withdrawal of Israeli settlers last year as the hunt for the soldier continued.

Its urgency increased after the body of Eliahu Asheri, an 18-year-old Jewish settler, was found near the Palestinian city of Ramallah. He had been shot in the head.

Palestinian militants claimed to have kidnapped a person from one of the West Bank's Israeli settlements shortly after the operation in which Cpl Shalit was captured, but there had been doubts over the truth of the claims.

Overnight, Israeli forces dropped leaflets on Palestinian communities in Gaza, warning of a forthcoming attack. Electricity and water to large areas of the strip were cut off.

Israeli warplanes also buzzed the summer house of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, yesterday. Several senior members of Hamas have been sheltered in the Syrian capital, Damascus, for many years.