(Edits throughout, adds Hamas reaction paragraph 2) By Atef Sa'ad NABLUS, West Bank, April 22 (Reuters) - Israeli forces killed nine Palestinians, at least five of them militants, over the weekend, in the most serious flare-up of Israeli-Palestinian violence in months. The deaths drew a threat on Sunday from a spokesman for Hamas, the Islamist group that heads the Palestinian coalition government, to strike back through "all means of resistance". In a raid on Sunday, Israeli troops surrounded a house in Nablus, in the occupied West Bank, and shot dead two members of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in a gun battle, local residents said. An Israeli military source confirmed that troops killed the two men, saying both were wanted over their involvement in planning attacks that included attempted suicide bombings in Israel. Several hours later, Israeli forces killed a 17-year-old Palestinian near the West Bank city of Ramallah, residents said. An Israeli military spokesman said an Israeli force was confronted by a crowd of dozens of Palestinians, some of whom were holding petrol bombs and others, knives. "They spotted a man about to throw a petrol bomb, fired at him and saw that he was hit," the spokesman said. Israeli forces killed 6 Palestinians -- three armed militants, a policeman and a 17-year-old girl in or near the West Bank city of Jenin and a civilian riding in a car with Islamic Jihad gunmen in Gaza, residents and medical officials said. The civilian, 45, was killed in an air strike, only the second in Gaza since a November truce, which the Israeli military said targeted militants who had fired makeshift rockets at the Israeli border town of Sderot. NO NORMALISATION Responding to the deaths, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, called on Arab countries to drop any notion of negotiating peace with Israel. "I urge them to stop any political initiative that would lead to creating a state of normalisation with the Israeli occupation," Haniyeh told Reuters. Haniyeh said further in the interview in Gaza City that Israel's killings "reveal the political deception which is being practised on the Palestinian people through the political meetings and the meetings of leaders" with Israelis. At a meeting in Cairo last week which Haniyeh attended, the Arab League named a working group headed by Egypt and Jordan to contact Israel over a 2002 Arab peace plan offering normal relations in return for land and a Palestinian state. Hamas has rejected Western demands it recognise Israel as a condition for dropping a crippling aid embargo on the Palestinian government. The group formed a governing coalition with President Mahmoud Abbas's secular Fatah faction in March in a bid to ease the embargo and stem Palestinian infighting that has killed dozens since December. (Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza)
