Five Turkish policemen and two Islamic militants were killed in a shoot-out in the eastern city of Van early yesterday.
A security official said the shooting broke out after police, acting on a tip-off, surrounded two houses and called on those inside to surrender. "They answered with gunfire," he said.
The five policemen were killed in the gun battle and six others wounded. Two Hizbullah militants were also shot dead and another, thought to be wounded, escaped, he said.
The raid came as police mounted a nationwide crackdown on Hizbullah Islamic rebels, arresting hundreds of suspected militants and unearthing more than 50 bodies said to be their victims.
Pictures of the corpses, tortured to death and buried in back yards and basements, have shocked the country.
The secretive Hizbullah guerrilla group, seeking to set up a state based on strict Sharia Islamic law, grew up in the late 1980s in south-east Turkey.
Its first victims were supporters of Abdullah Ocalan's Kurdish rebel separatists, leading many to accuse them of being state-backed "contra-guerrillas", a charge Turkish authorities strenuously deny.
A decline in Kurdish separatist violence following Ocalan's capture last year has allowed Turkey to crack down on Islamic radicalism.
"Hizbullah was laid bare once the guns were silenced and life began normalising in the southeast," a Hurriyet newspaper commentator, Enis Berberoglu, said.
The region was a battleground between troops and PKK rebels for 15 years until last February when Turkish forces apprehended the guerrilla chief abroad and brought him to Turkey.
Since then, a partial PKK withdrawal from the region on Ocalan's orders - which Turkey says is a bid to evade his death sentence for treason - has brought a lull in fighting.
The state is now using the grisly Hizbullah killings as a stick with which to beat peaceful Islamist politicians who were already reeling from a poor electoral performance last year and from internal rivalries and legal assaults.
The secularist Prime Minister, Mr Bulent Ecevit, backed by the mainstream media, has pointed to the killings as an inevitable consequence of mixing politics and religion.
"Hizbullah is officially seen as a serious danger that could replace the PKK terror," the Hurriyet newspaper commentator said.