Five Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with troops accused of firing on a hospital and using women and children as human shields in one incident. On the diplomatic front, meanwhile, skirmishing over the implementation of the so-called roadmap for peace in the Middle East continued. A 12-year-old boy was shot in the head in the grounds of the main hospital in the northern West bank city of Jenin, as troops fired on a nearby house where wanted militants were holed up, an AFP correspondent and a Palestinian medical source reported. Hospital nurse Said Atatra said the boy was killed and six other Palestinians, also inside the hospital compound, were wounded in the shooting. "When the shooting started, many of the civilians and neighbours of the house took refuge inside the hospital walls," he explained. Three militants, including a member of a radical offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah group, were captured during the operation, which was launched by an undercover unit and backed up by two tanks, the sources said. According to the correspondent and several witnesses, two women and three girls aged four, six and nine, were used as human shields by soldiers firing at the building sheltering the Palestinian gunmen. A young British-Polish human rights activist volunteering with various local humanitarian organisations and identifying herself only as Ewa said she was among them. "Some soldiers were standing beside us holding big metal shields to protect themselves, and others were behind the wall against which we were sitting, hurling grenades inside the building where the men were," Ewa, 24, told AFP. The Israeli army made no immediate comment when contacted by AFP. A few miles to the south, the army raided the narrow streets of the city of Nablus' old quarter, sparking clashes with gunmen, Palestinian security sources said. A member of the same Fatah splinter group, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, was shot dead and some 20 young stone-throwers wounded, the sources added. The West Bank flare-up capped a day of violence that started with bloody army raids in the Gaza Strip, when two Palestinian policemen and a civilian were killed by Israeli troops and three more wounded. Army sources said an Israeli unit with tanks and backed by a helicopter engaged four armed Palestinians in a sector from which anti-tank rockets and mortar bombs had been fired at the settlement of Netzarim. General Abdelrazaq Majeida, who heads the Palestinian national security services in the Gaza Strip, said the three men killed were shot in cold blood. He also accused the army of preventing ambulances from reaching the wounded for more than two hours and that the three men could have been saved but bled to death. The army also raided an area in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis, firing a missile from a helicopter that wounded 23 Palestinians, the sources added. Armoured vehicles then entered the flashpoint autonomous area near Tefeha checkpoint, which guards the road leading to Mawasi, a Palestinian enclave which lies inside the sprawling settlement bloc of Gush Katif. Three more Palestinians were wounded in exchanges of fire, and the army dynamited three four-storey buildings, which military sources said were empty and used by Palestinian snipers. Palestinian authorities said some of the 22 flats reduced to rubble were inhabited. **PHOTO CAPTION*** A Palestinian school boy is carried away by medics after he was injured during clashes between Palestinian stone throwers and Israeli troops in the center of the West Bank town of Nablus.(AFP/Jaafar Ashtiyeh)