TEHRAN The Israeli cabinet decided Wednesday to press ahead with its controversial policy of attacking Palestinian militants considered a threat to state security, Israeli Public Radio said. Defying international condemnation of its bloody attack in the West Bank town of Nablus, which left six hardline Palestinian activists and two children dead, Israel said it would continue to target "terrorists and their commanders," the radio said.

Israel ran into a storm of criticism Wednesday for its attack on the offices of a hardline Palestinian group which killed 11 people, including two children and six Islamist activists of Hamas movement, which triggered a wave of violence across the region amid Palestinian cries for vengeance.

As the international community warned that the strike in the West Bank town of Nablus was a dangerous escalation of the 10-month conflict that has rocked the region, around 100,000 furious mourners swarmed to the Palestinian funerals.

The strike triggered a night of violence across the region which left at least 11 Palestinians dead, including a 15-month-old baby.

The United States, the Zionist state's firmest ally, denounced the Nablus strike as a "new and dangerous escalation of violence".

"This attack ... is highly provocative, and makes efforts to restore calm much more difficult", a State Department spokesman said in a condemnation echoed by Paris and London.

A total 685 people -- 538 Palestinians and 128 Israelis - have been killed since the uprising, Initifada, began 10 months ago.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said that "acts as provocative as the one committed today in Nablus run the risk of completely dismantling efforts to establish security cooperation."

"It's a dead end," he concluded.

Russia's Foreign Ministry said "It is very evident that violence only leads to more violence, and the inadequate use of force only deepens the hostile relations between the two sides."

Hamas' Spiritual Leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin promised to exact revenge on Israel.

Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah group, threatened to attack "Zionists and their American allies".

And more than 100,000 mourners, many of them armed and firing their weapons into the air, swarmed into Nablus from the city itself and surrounding villages and refugee camps, to bury the eight dead.

Speakers called for revenge not just against Israel but also against Palestinian collaborators who aid the Israeli security forces. In Amman, hundreds of Jordanian students, chanting Islam's rallying cry "God Is Greatest", staged a protest on Wednesday against the Israeli missile attack on the office of Hamas. Around 300 students rallied on the campus of the university of Jordan in Amman as riot police surrounded the area, but no clashes took place, witnesses said. "Go On Fighting, Hamas. You Are the Gun and We Are the Bullets," they shouted. Carrying stretchers, the protesters staged a mock funeral for the eight Palestinians who were killed in Tuesday's attack on a Hamas office in Nablus.