Mideast murders spark fear of vendetta

12:30 PM By ERIC SILVER

JERUSALEM - The crescendo of violence that has caused more than 320 Palestinian and 40 Israeli deaths over the past three months was turning into a murderous vendetta that could extinguish the already fading hopes of a peace agreement.

Israeli and Palestinian spokesmen vowed revenge yesterday after an extremist Jewish settler leader and a senior official of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement were shot dead on the West Bank.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, said: "No type of violence against Israeli citizens will break our determination. The killers will not go unpunished."

Marwan Barghouti, West Bank commander of Fatah's Tanzim militia, retorted: "Israel will pay the price. Barak has opened the gates of hell."

Nabil Abu-Rdaineh, a spokesman for Mr Arafat, added: "The Israeli policy of assassination and aggression will harm ... efforts to revive the peace process."

By last night mourners chanting "Death to Arabs" were rampaging through the streets of Jewish west Jerusalem in search of Palestinians to attack after a funeral for the son of the anti-Arab rabbi Meir Kahane.

The day's slaughter began at about 6.45am when Palestinian gunmen ambushed a car driven by Binyamin Kahane, the American-born son and ideological heir of the late Rabbi Kahane, whose Kach party was outlawed in Israel and the United States.

Binyamin Kahane, 34, and his wife, Talia, 31, were killed and five of their six children, aged from two months to 10 years, were wounded. They were hit by automatic fire while driving through the West Bank from Jerusalem to their home village of Kfar Tapuach, near Nablus.

Mr Kahane took over Kach after his father was assassinated by an Egyptian in New York 10 years ago, renaming the movement "Kahane Lives".

An unknown group, calling itself the Martyrs of the Al Aqsa Intifada, claimed responsibility in Beirut. A day earlier, a Fatah leaflet distributed throughout the West Bank said the Palestinians "utterly rejected" President Bill Clinton's peace plan and urged Palestinian fighters "to make the next two weeks days of struggle against Israeli soldiers and settlers".

Three hours after the Kahane murder, Thabet Thabet, a 50-year-old Palestinian dentist, was shot five times in the chest as he backed his car out of his home in the West Bank town of Tulkarm. Palestinian security officials pointed the finger at Israeli undercover troops.

Mr Thabet headed Fatah's political arm in Tulkarem, which has been relatively calm during the present intifada. After returning to the West Bank in 1974, he was frequently detained by the Israelis until the first intifada ended in 1993.

Neighbours said that he had never been involved in violence and often spoke in favour of the Oslo process. The Thabet killing bore the fingerprints of an authorised revenge operation.

Israeli military and civilian sources pointedly declined to divert the blame to vigilante groups. An army spokesman instead accused the Palestinian authorities of preying on soldiers and settlers.

"The Palestinians want to kill people only because they are Israeli," he added. "We are going to cope with this situation."

Israeli and Palestinian militants were less circumspect. Noam Federman, a fanatical follower of the elder Kahane and leader of his organisation in Hebron, said: "Whoever says there are military solutions speaksincorrectly. There will alwaysbe another Arab and another Arab who will want to kill Jews."

The Palestinian Red Crescent said last night 28 Palestinians were wounded, 11 of them by live ammunition, during clashes in Gaza, Tulkarem and other West Bank towns.

President Clinton tried again to persuade Mr Arafat to accept his ideas as a basis for a settlement. He also criticised Mr Barak's weekend announcement that he would never cede to the Palestinians' sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the Muslim Haram al-Sharif, in Jerusalem.

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