Walid Abeidi, 40, was shot dead during heavy exchanges of fire with Israeli troops that had encircled his house in the village of Qabatiya near the northern West Bank town of Jenin, the sources said.

There was no immediate reaction from the Israeli army.

The raid comes one day after the deadliest single day of violence in a year in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces killed 19 Palestinians, including the son of a top Hamas leader, and Palestinian militants shot dead a civilian inside Israel.

The Israeli army carries out near daily raids in the impoverished Gaza Strip, where the Islamic Hamas movement seized power in June 2006, in a bid to curb rocket fire against southern Israel.

The violence erupted after Israeli and Palestinians renewed peace talks on the most sensitive issues of the Middle East conflict with the hope of reaching an agreement by the end of the year.

It also came on the heels of US President George W. Bush’s visit to the region aimed at garnering Arab support for the peace process.

Since November, more than 115 Palestinians, most of them militants, have been killed by Israeli fire in the Gaza Strip alone, according to an AFP count.

Wednesday’s death brings to 6,070 the number of people killed since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinians, according to an AFP tally.