"I think we are bound to see more of these because US troops are inexperienced in this type of war, this type of environment," said Shlomo Brom of the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Experts in Israel, whose military has hard-won experience in running checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories, said US troops were unprepared for this kind of attack, the threat of which Israeli troops face daily in the West Bank and Gaza.

Despite its experience on the ground, the Israeli army has made its share of deadly blunders: in 30 months of fighting against the Palestinian intifada, 58 Palestinians have been killed at Israeli checkpoints, the Palestinian rights group LAW said Tuesday.

Of that number, 20 were women and 13 children. Other Palestinian groups put the number even higher, at 72.

Apart from the danger to both sides -- 10 soldiers were killed by Palestinian snipers at a West Bank checkpoint last March --, there are the humiliating waits and security searches that push tensions ever higher and remind the civilian population they live under occupation.

The army says the roadblocks on the major raids in the territories are justified to stop Palestinian militants sneaking into Israel or attacking the many Jewish settlements and army bases in the occupied zones.

While posing little threat to the Israeli military, kamikaze bombers have killed scores of Israeli civilians after infiltrating towns and cities.

The situation in southern Iraq contains some similar challenges to those faced by the Israeli army, said the military specialist of Channel 10 television here, Alon Ben David.

"If you look at the urban combat conducted in the last two days ... you see fighting very similar to what happened here in Defensive Shield," the operation by the Israeli army last spring to invade almost the entire West Bank after a spate of suicide bombings, he said.

Brom said a suicide car bombing at another US checkpoint in southern Iraq on Saturday explained the jumpiness of the US troops who on Monday opened fire on a civilian car which failed to stop at their checkpoint.

"When the troops are very tense, they cannot differentiate between friends and foes, and this kind of incident is bound to happen," said Brom, adding that US forces in Iraq, which invaded 13 days ago to topple President Saddam Hussein, were still in the learning stage.

He said the way to reduce the risk of such tragic accidents was to "adopt the correct procedures and keep the discipline of the troops."

The US-led forces "still haven't adopted the correct procedures for the situation", he said.

"They are experiencing the stage of fear and distrust, because currently what they know is that anyone is a potential suicide bomber. They are not used to it like the Israelis are," said Ben David.

He said the solution was to strengthen the checkpoints' defences to better protect troops and make them less jumpy.

"If you provide them with some kind of protection -- you see a lot of concrete barricades in the territories -- that gives the soldier an extra second to respond because he is not that exposed, he is able to think for a second before he shoots," he said.

While the suicide bombing is unlikely to have any military impact on the US-led campaign, the blundered killing of the civilians will have serious consequences for the US-British attempt to win Iraqi "hearts and minds."

"It's very difficult to get the heart of people when you are killing their civilians," noted Brom.

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