Raiding Israeli forces killed six Palestinian militants and four civilians on Wednesday, the highest single-day Palestinian death toll in the West Bank for more than two years, witnesses and medics said.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon added to pessimism about peace prospects when he declared in a published interview that Israel was not following the U.S.-backed "road map" plan for now. It has gone nowhere amid persistent violence on both sides.

Israeli forces, sustaining pressure on Palestinian militants in advance of a planned pullout from some occupied land next year, killed five militants and an 11-year-old girl bystander during a raid into the West Bank city of Nablus.

Four of the slain gunmen were from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, and the other from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, witnesses said. Israeli military sources confirmed that five "senior terrorists" had been targeted in the pre-dawn operation.

Hours later, Israeli special forces backed up by helicopter gunships killed four Palestinians -- a militant, a policeman and two civilians -- at a car repair shop in the northern city of Jenin, according to local witnesses and medics said.

They had earlier said all four dead were militants.

An army spokeswoman said all the Palestinians were armed and they were shot inside a cafe.

The two raids at the onset of the Jewish new year holiday killed the most Palestinians in one day since April 2002, at the height of a massive Israeli offensive against militants waging a now four-year-old revolt.

"This is a big crime that cannot be forgiven and is part of Israeli determination to escalate aggression," Arafat said at his Ramallah headquarters where Israeli forces confine him.

Israel has cranked up efforts to eliminate militants to prevent them proclaiming victory once Sharon carries out his plan to "disengage" from the conflict by evacuating more than 8,000 settlers from Gaza and the northern West Bank in 2005.

"ROAD MAP" AT DEAD-END

Many Palestinians see unilateral "disengagement" as a cover for cementing Israel's grip on swathes of the West Bank, where most of the 240,000 Jewish settlers live, and deny them a viable state promised them by the "road map."

But President Bush has endorsed Sharon's plan in the face of the breakdown in "road map" peacemaking.

Israeli officials have privately written off the plan launched by Bush in June 2003 until Palestinian leaders curb militants targeting Israelis and carry out democratic reform.

Sharon's remarks in a Jewish new year holiday interview with the daily Yedioth Ahronoth were his clearest yet on the issue. "Even now we are not following the road map," he said.

The road map sets out steps, including an end to Palestinian violence and a freeze on Israeli settlement activity, toward a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But mutual mistrust and reluctance to take the first step have stymied the process.

"It could very well be that after the evacuation, there will be a very long period in which nothing else will happen," Sharon said. "To be able to reach the point of taking additional steps, there must be a change in Palestinian strategy and there is not even the tiniest sign pointing to such a change taking place."

Palestinian Negotiations Minister Saeb Erekat called Sharon's comments an "eye opener" to international mediators "who insist that the Gaza plan should be part of the road map. He (Sharon) is openly saying it is not related."

An Israeli newspaper poll found that 58 percent of Israelis support "disengagement." But far-right opposition to ceding occupied land has mounted in parallel with police probing threats on Sharon's life attributed to Israeli ultra-rightists.