Three days of Mideast slaughter

JERUSALEM - Palestinian gunmen killed six Israelis, including a mother and three of her children, in a raid on a settlement in the West Bank yesterday, hours after Yasser Arafat demanded an end to attacks on Israeli civilians.

The gunmen burst into a house in the Itamar settlement and opened fire shortly after Israel said it was calling up some reserve soldiers to reinforce its incursions into Palestinian areas following two suicide bombings in as many days.

The Jerusalem bombings, which killed 26 Israelis, prompted United States President George W. Bush to put off a speech charting a course towards Palestinian statehood, apparently concerned it could offend Israelis and seem to reward the bombers.

Israelis now have lost 32 killed in three major attacks, one of Israel's highest death tolls during any three-day period during the 20-month-old Palestinian uprising.

In the latest attack, two Palestinians infiltrated the Itamar settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus and stormed into a home, spraying gunfire.

"There are six people killed, at least three of them children and one of them a woman," a spokesman for the Magen David Adom ambulance service said.

An Israeli military source said soldiers rushed the house and shot dead one of the gunmen, but the second attacker fled as a fire erupted inside.

Bentzi Lieberman, a settler leader, told Israel Radio the father of the family arrived at the scene to "mourn his wife and three of his children as he sat by their corpses, watching his house burn". A settler security guard was also among the dead.

"We are in the middle of a war, a hard war, a cruel war, a war that the Palestinian terrorists are carrying out against women and children and old people," Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told Jewish leaders. "We are facing a coalition of terror led by the Palestinian Authority and backed by an axis of evil - Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and bin Laden," said Sharon, who summoned Army commanders to discuss a military response.

The radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was "a reaction to Israeli fence-building ... and to challenge the repeated Israeli incursions into Palestinian territory".

Israel has begun building a 110km security fence on its West Bank frontier and has vowed to retake and hold some Palestinian territories after the back-to-back suicide bombings.

Yesterday's attack was the second time militants had struck Itamar in the past month.

On May 29, a Palestinian gunman shot dead three teenage students from a Jewish seminary before he was shot dead inside the settlement.

The latest Itamar raid occurred just hours after Arafat, under US pressure to rein in militants, issued a personal appeal for a halt to attacks on Israeli civilians in a widely circulated written statement and in comments to reporters.

Arafat made no mention of stopping attacks on settlers, whom most Palestinians view as part of an army usurping West Bank and Gaza Strip lands they want for a state.

Settlements have been frequent targets of militants since the start of their uprising against Israeli occupation in September 2000.

On the suicide bombings, Arafat said in the West Bank town of Ramallah: "I personally, and the Palestinian Authority, are completely against it [the attacks]."

He cautioned that such attacks could result in Israeli forces reoccupying Palestinian-ruled land in the West Bank under a new policy of responding to suicide bombings by retaking and holding such territory.

Arafat has made such appeals before but the suicide bombings have not ceased.

The Islamic radical movement Hamas refused to call a halt to its campaign of violence against Israel.

"As long as the occupation is here, our people have the right to struggle against it," Ismail Abu Haniya, a Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, said. "I do not think the Palestinian Authority or any other faction will accept any abuses by the Zionist enemy in our territories and villages."

He demanded that Palestinian secular and Islamist factions, as well as the authority, "co-operate in order to face the enemy and make its policies and diktats fail".

Israel says it does not target Palestinian civilians but acknowledges they have been caught up in clashes between troops and militants hunkered down in populated areas.

Israel announced its policy of retaking territory transferred to Palestinian self-rule under 1990s interim peace deals after a bomber, claimed by Hamas as one of their militants, killed 19 Israelis on a Jerusalem bus on Wednesday. An attack on Thursday killed seven at a bus stop.

Troops entered the West Bank town of Bethlehem, the adjacent Deheisheh refugee camp, and the village of Betounia outside Ramallah late on Thursday, and Tulkarm early yesterday.

They have been in the northern West Bank towns of Jenin and Qalqiliya since Wednesday.

The new policy has alarmed some centre-left members of Sharon's coalition Government who oppose any long-term reoccupation, including Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.

But Ben-Eliezer said yesterday the Army was mobilising some reserve units to reinforce conscripts on active duty. An Israeli security source said the scope of the call-up was limited.

"We have no choice but to deepen our presence in the major strongholds of terror, namely in large parts ... of the main [Palestinian] cities," Ben-Eliezer told Israeli television.

The Army said troops carried out searches, imposed curfews and made a number of arrests. It said: "Forces will stay in the cities until they achieve their operational aims."

- REUTERS

Feature: Middle East

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