A 15-year-old Palestinian was arrested by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers at a checkpoint outside Nablus Tuesday afternoon after he was found carrying two pipe bombs in a black bag, Israel Radio said.

Security officials said that soldiers were alerted by the bag and asked the teenager to open it for inspection and saw the pipe bombs, the radio said.

The soldiers then instructed him to place the bag on the ground and sappers were dispatched to the site to blow the bombs up. It was the second such arrest of a teenager at the Hawara checkpoint, on the outskirts of Nablus, in the past two days, Israeli military sources said.

On Sunday, a 14-year-old Palestinian teenager wearing a belt that contained two pipe bombs was arrested at the same checkpoint. The sources said the boy was apparently planning to carry out a suicide attack at the crossing.

Also on Tuesday, a gun battle erupted between militants and Palestinian National Authority police in the West Bank city of Jenin.

One bystander was lightly wounded in the incident that began after the militants refused to hand over a stolen car in which they were driving.

In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian militants fired an anti-tank missile at IDF troops Tuesday afternoon near Rafah. Earlier in the day, militants fired a mortar shell at an IDF position in southern Gaza.

There were no casualties in either of these incidents, Israel Radio reported.

(Xinhua News Agency May 25, 2005)