US Vice President Dick Cheney has said that Israel had some justification when it deliberately killed Palestinians thought to be planning bombings.
In remarks that contradict US State Department policy on the attacks, Mr Cheney told
Fox News
: "If you've got an organization that has plotted or is plotting some kind of suicide bomber attack, for example, and they (the Israelis) have hard evidence of who it is and where they're located, I think there's some justification in their trying to protect themselves by preempting."
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher yesterday repeated the long-standing US position that it opposes the Israeli government's policy of killing prominent Palestinians.
"We're against this practice of targeted killings," he told his daily briefing. On the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell criticized an attack that killed eight people in or near a Hamas office in the West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday.
Mr Cheney told Fox News it would be better if the Israelis could work with the Palestinian Authority of President Yasser Arafat to prevent bombings and imprison people planning them.
"In some cases they (the Israelis) have in fact gone to the Palestinian authorities with names and locations, and asked that the Palestinians take action against the terrorists in Palestinian territory.
"And when the Palestinians have failed to do that, then the Israelis have gone forward and launched a strike," he added.
The State Department and the White House denied this week a Washington Postreport that they were at odds over how to deal with Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Mr Powell said they had a consistent view of Israeli targeted attacks.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said: "The administration ... at all levels, deplores the violence there and that includes the targeted attacks." A State Department official said he could not comment immediately on Cheney's remarks.