JERUSALEM (CNN) -- Israeli forces made forays into northern and southern Gaza Tuesday morning in operations targeting Palestinian militants, killing up to six, according to Palestinian sources and the Israel Defense Forces.


Israeli tanks maneuver after an operation near the Suffa Crossing between Israel and Gaza Strip.

Israel carried out airstrikes against Qassam rocket launch sites in the north. IDF said the strikes killed two militants, while Palestinian security sources said one member of Islamic Jihad was killed.

In southern Gaza, Palestinian security sources said 30 Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered the territory early Tuesday morning and were conducting house-to-house searches after shutting down the main road between Rafah and Khan Yunis.

The IDF acknowledged having just 10 tanks about half a mile (a kilometer) inside the Sufa border crossing, saying its troops were on regular operational duty against the terror infrastructure in Gaza.

Four Islamic Jihad members were killed by Israeli fire, according to Palestinian security and medical sources. IDF said it fired on and hit three Palestinian militants, without elaborating.

In addition, the Palestinian sources said nine Palestinians were injured, including two journalists.

IDF also said that four Israeli soldiers were lightly injured when a rocket-propelled grenade hit their tank, near Khan Yunis

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- The man tipped to be Russia's next president said Tuesday he wanted incumbent President Vladimir Putin to become the country's next prime minister.


First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev pictured on the left of President Vladimir Putin.

Dmitry Medvedev said on Russian state television that he has asked Putin to head the government if he wins elections scheduled for March next year.

The announcement comes only a day after Putin's United Russia party formally nominated Medvedev to be the party's candidate for the presidential elections. Russian law bars Putin from seeking a third term as president.

"I call upon him to agree in principle to head the Russian government after the elections of the new president," Medvedev, currently the deputy prime minister, told state television.

Medvedev, who is also chairman of the state energy giant Gazprom, said he wanted Putin to remain at the center of Russian political life because it was important to "continue the 'political' course that has been started in the late 1990s."

A former lawyer who hails from Putin's native St. Petersburg, Medvedev, 42, managed the president's election campaign in 2000 and is considered part of Putin's inner circle of advisers.

Medvedev's comments, coming just 24-hours after the announcement of his candidature, end a long period of speculation over the future political makeup of Russia.

With Putin's backing and no major political figures announcing plans to run against him, Medvedev looks likely to coast to victory in next year's presidential elections.

Victory would pave the way for the incumbent Russian leader to take over the running of the government.

Putin, who has consolidated power in the hands of the Kremlin during his eight years in power, had already made it clear he was keen to play a role in Russian politics after he left office.

However, pro-democracy groups accuse him of trampling on democratic freedoms and stifling free speech.

Opposition leaders said the job offer to Putin was "predictable."

Sergei Ivanenko, deputy leader of the liberal opposition, Yabloko, said the purpose of the recent political maneuverings was "to keep the government in the form it currently exists in", according to the Russian news agency, Interfax.


Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told CNN that Putin's attempts to maintain the status quo would eventually come unstuck, however, once Medvedev was "confronted with the necessity to make changes."

"He has been chosen for one reason, apparently: to preside over Putin's status quo and stability. But this stability is very difficult to sustain," Shevtsova said.

Even so, Medvedev's appeal to his current boss was greeted with enthusiasm by church leaders.

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, told Interfax it would help "bring stability and a broad base of trust to the authorities."

Putin and his party enjoy huge popular support in Russia.

United Russia swept parliamentary elections earlier this month, winning nearly two-thirds of the national vote. The party now holds 315 seats in the 450-seat parliament while the pro-Kremlin Fair Russia party has 38 seats.

The Russian leader has not yet responded to Medvedev's offer

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A former CIA agent who participated in interrogations of terror suspects said Tuesday that the controversial interrogation technique of "waterboarding" has saved lives, but he considers the method torture and now opposes its use.


Ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou says he underwent waterboarding in training and cracked in a few seconds.

1 of 2 Former CIA operative John Kiriakou also told CNN's "American Morning" that he disagrees with a decision to destroy videotapes of certain interrogations, namely of al Qaeda's Abu Zubayda. Kiriakou made the remarks as two congressional committees prepared to grill CIA Director Michael Hayden on the destruction of the tapes and on "alternative" means of interrogation.

Waterboarding begins by placing a suspect on a table with the suspect's feet slightly elevated, said Kiriakou, who was waterboarded several years ago as part of his CIA training. He said he elected not to learn how to perform the technique, which is designed to emulate the sensation of drowning.

Once a suspect is secured on the table, interrogators wrap his or her face in a cellophane-like material, Kiriakou said.

"There is a bladder, or a water source, above the head with water pouring down on the mouth, so no water is going into your mouth, but it induces a gag reflex and makes you feel like you're choking," Kiriakou said. Watch the ex-agent describe the procedure »


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Kiriakou said he lasted only a few seconds during his training because his body felt like it was seizing up almost immediately.

"It's entirely unpleasant," Kiriakou said. "You are so full of tension that you tense up, your muscles tighten up. It's very uncomfortable."

Abu Zubayda lasted a little longer, said Kiriakou, but not much.

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The former agent, who said he participated in the Abu Zubayda interrogation but not his waterboarding, said the CIA decided to waterboard the al Qaeda operative only after he was "wholly uncooperative" for weeks and refused to answer questions.

All that changed -- and Zubayda reportedly had a divine revelation -- after 30 to 35 seconds of waterboarding, Kiriakou said he learned from the CIA agents who performed the technique.

The terror suspect, who is being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reportedly gave up information that indirectly led to the the 2003 raid in Pakistan yielding the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged planner of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Kiriakou said.

The CIA was unaware of Mohammed's stature before the Abu Zubayda interrogation, the former agent said.

"Abu Zubayda's the one who told us that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was so important in the al Qaeda structure, and we didn't realize at the time how important he was," Kiriakou said.

Abu Zubayda also divulged information on "al Qaeda's leadership structure and mentioned people who we really didn't have any familiarization with [and] told us who we should be thinking about, who we should be looking at, and who was important in the organization so we were able to focus our investigation this way," Kiriakou said.

Abu Zubayda reportedly told the agent who waterboarded him that "Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate because it would make it easier on the other brothers who had been captured," Kiriakou said.

Though the information wrenched from Abu Zubayda "stopped terrorist attacks and saved lives," Kiriakou said he opposes waterboarding.

"Now after all these years, time has passed, and we're more on our feet in this fight against al Qaeda, and I think it's unnecessary," he said.

In a separate CNN interview, Kiriakou said the Justice Department and National Security Council reportedly approved waterboarding and other "alternative" interrogation techniques in June 2002.

"It was a policy decision that came down from the White House," he said.

Despite the executive blessing, Kiriakou and other agents were conflicted over whether to learn the technique, he said.

"One senior officer said to me that this is something you really have to think deeply about," the former agent said, adding he "struggled with it morally."

Kiriakou conceded his position might be hypocritical and said that the technique was useful -- even if he wanted to distance himself from it.

"Waterboarding was an important technique, and some of these other techniques were important in collecting the information," he said. "But I personally didn't want to do it. I didn't think it was right in the long run, and I didn't want to be associated with it."

As for the tapes of the interrogations, Kiriakou -- who claims neither he nor the other CIA agents realized they were being recorded during the Abu Zubayda interrogation -- said he disagrees with the decision to destroy the tapes.

"I don't see the reason to destroy them," Kiriakou said. "There's a possibility that they could be used in a criminal investigation, and frankly, for the historical record, I think it's important to have things like that maintained."

The Justice Department and CIA have announced a preliminary inquiry into the matter. Hayden, the CIA director, is slated to go before congressional committees Tuesday and Wednesday.


Hayden has said the CIA destroyed the tapes "only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative or judicial inquiries."

Congressional leaders said they were never properly notified about the decision.

TEL AVIV, Israel (CNN) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday international pressure on Iran has been effective and may need increasing -- despite a U.S. intelligence report that Tehran stopped work on nuclear weapons fours years ago.


Prime Minister Olmert says Iran remains a threat.

Olmert, speaking at the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies, said it was down to the United States, Russia, China and key European Union nations to keep the pressure on Iran.

The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran released last week said Iran halted work toward a nuclear weapon while under international scrutiny in 2003 and is unlikely to be able to produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb until 2010 to 2015.

The assessment reversed a 2005 report that found the Islamic Republic was "determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure."

Olmert said the intelligence report launched "an exaggerated debate" that caused some to believe it signaled a U.S. "retreat from its support of Israel," a belief the prime minister called "groundless."

"The United States led the global campaign against Iran and mobilized its full international strength to set in motion the adoption by the U.N. Security Council of two resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran, since America was convinced that Iran constitutes a real threat to peace in the region and to vital American interests," he said. "This has not changed. Not because I say so -- the Americans say so, the British, the Germans and the French say so as well."

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He went on: "Israel supports the tightening of the economic sanctions on Iran and its continued isolation until it fulfills the recommendations of the Security Council and suspends all activities to enrich uranium."

But he added: "The state of Israel is not the main flag-bearer against the quirks of the regime in Tehran." That task, he said, falls to the international community, "headed by the United States, Russia, France, England, Germany and China, and they declare that they will continue in their efforts ceaselessly."

Olmert noted Iran's continued efforts to enrich uranium and said Tehran is working on "the development of a sophisticated electrical system and ballistic missiles." He stopped short of matching comments by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak last week, who said on Israeli Army Radio that "Iran is probably continuing its program of making a nuclear bomb."

Bush, citing Iran's continued work to enrich uranium, said last week the new intelligence estimate does not change U.S. policy toward that nation.

"They had the program. They halted the program. It's a warning signal because they could restart it," he said.

Olmert said Tuesday: "I attribute great importance to the declaration by the President of the United States, George Bush, that nothing has changed.

"Iran was and remains dangerous and we must continue the international pressure with full force to dissuade Iran from its nuclear tendencies. I trust and am confident that the United States will continue to lead the international campaign to stop the development of a nuclear Iran."