Ankara - Turkish war planes backed by artillery on Thursday night conducted attacks on a large group of Kurdish separatists inside northern Iraq, the Turkish military announced on Friday.

A Turkish General Staff spokesman said the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) group were attempting to cross into Turkey where they planned to carry out attacks on Turkish targets. A large number of the PKK group were killed in Thursday night's bombardments, the spokesman said.

The attacks come almost a week after a PKK attack on a military border post left 17 soldiers and 23 PKK separatists dead.

Tel Aviv - Israeli police were on high alert in mixed-community cities Friday after two days of the worst Arab-Jewish clashes in years in the northern port town of Acre.

Acre police arrested at least 11 rioters by late Thursday and planned to press charges against them Friday morning.

Eight people suffered minor injuries. One of them was run over by a police horse, while another was hit in the head by a stone.

Rioters damaged dozens of cars and shop windows in the Roman-built city.

The clashes broke out around midnight Wednesday on the eve of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday, or Day of Atonement, the holiest day on the Hebrew calender.

Amman - The two US journalists who were released by Syria on Thursday were quoted Friday by the paper they worked for, the Jordan Times, as saying they were "kidnapped and taken by force into the Syrian territory."

Taylor Luck, 23, and Holli Chmela, 27, arrived back in Jordan in the early hours of Friday after the Syrian authorities handed them over to the US embassy in Damascus.

The two journalists arrived in Lebanon on September 29 for a vacation, but were missing since October 1, when they reportedly departed Beirut en route to Byblos and Tripoli and then to Aleppo.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the two US citizens entered Syria "illegally" with smugglers and did not obtain entry visas.

Cairo - Palestinian Islamists who met with Egyptian mediators have agreed to form a government of "national reconciliation," not one of national unity, Hamas leader Mahmoud al- Zahar said Thursday.

The government of national reconciliation "might include members of other Palestinian factions along with Hamas and Fatah," Zahar told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

He declined to explain how the powers of both Hamas and Fatah would be divided in such a government. "We do not want to go into those details now."

Tel Aviv - Israel sealed off the West Bank early Wednesday morning ahead of the Day of Atonement holiday, which begins Wednesday at sundown and lasts until Thursday.

The closure would be lifted on Friday morning, according to a security assessment, an Israeli military communique said.

The military also said it would "increase its alertness in order to ensure the safety of the citizens of Israel, while preserving, to the best of its ability, the daily life of the Palestinian population."

Baghdad - Two blasts occurred outside Iraq's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday as visiting US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte was due to hold a press conference in the Green Zone compound, al-J