RAMALLAH, West Bank, 8 November — Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinians in fresh violence yesterday which failed to subside despite Israel’s continuing withdrawal from Palestinian-ruled towns under US pressure. Israeli tanks pulled out of Palestinian-ruled Ramallah overnight but remained in two of the six West Bank towns they entered last month after the assassination of a far-right Israeli Cabinet minister.

Amid signs of a Palestinian concession, an official said Palestinian President Yasser Arafat would not declare an independent state at the UN General Assembly on Sunday. But Israel still has crippling blockades on many Palestinian areas and the tanks redeployed just outside Ramallah.

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said yesterday Arab states want to see an end to harsh Israeli measures of combating a Palestinian uprising which erupted in September 2000 and the resumption of peacemaking with real results. “We are not going to be duped by the idea of a resumption of the peace process,” Moussa told reporters in London.

In fresh bloodshed, an Israeli undercover unit killed Issa Dabbabsi and wounded two others people in the village of Yata near the West Bank city of Hebron, Palestinian witnesses said. Earlier, Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian taxi driver during an exchange of fire with gunmen in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. Elsewhere, four Palestinian teenagers were wounded, two of them critically, by Israeli fire during stone-throwing clashes with Israeli border police near Jenin.

Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said yesterday Arafat would ask for “international protection...to restore calm, resume negotiations and work for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,” at the UN meeting to be attended by President George W. Bush. “The Palestinian leadership shall not take dramatic steps such as the unilateral declaration of a state,” he said.

In the latest development, the head of the Palestinian preventive security in the Gaza Strip, Muhammad Dahlan, has submitted his resignation, but it has not been accepted yet, Palestinian official sources said yesterday. Dahlan submitted his resignation on Oct. 26, the sources said.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian high court has ordered the release of two senior members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) arrested after the group assassinated extremist Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi last month, their lawyer told said.