Israeli teen killed in West Bank attack

A Palestinian man slipped into a West Bank settlement with a pickax Thursday and killed an Israeli teenager, bringing Israel’s new conservative government under pressure from the extreme right to react forcefully.

On his second full day in office, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heard demands from inside and outside his government to tighten Israel’s already stringent curbs on Palestinians in the West Bank.

Netanyahu had campaigned for office on a pledge to work toward peace by improving living conditions in the territory. While refusing to recommit Israel to the goal of an independent state for the Palestinians, he said he was willing to grant them the powers needed to govern themselves, as long as they don’t jeopardize Israel’s security.

The attack Thursday in the militant Jewish settlement of Bat Ayin prompted warnings from settler groups and right-wing politicians that any concessions such as lifting roadblocks, easing travel restrictions and halting settlement expansion would amount to surrender to the enemy.

“When you respond forgivingly and ease restrictions, you do not get results,” said David Rotem, a member of parliament with Israel Is Our Home, the ultranationalist party led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. “What you get is terror rearing its head.”

Yaakov Katz, leader of the pro-settler opposition National Union, criticized Netanyahu’s decision to retain Ehud Barak of the left-leaning Labor Party as defense minister. Because Barak in recent months has authorized the removal of some West Bank roadblocks, Katz said, Palestinian militants read the appointment as a sign of weakness and struck.

Netanyahu’s office responded with a terse statement saying he “views the attack with the utmost gravity and has instructed security elements to make every effort to apprehend the murderer.”

Israeli troops focused on the Palestinian village of Safa, across a valley from the settlement, between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Hebron. They put the village under curfew, searched homes, rounded up residents in a schoolyard and closed roads in the area.

Officials said the assailant walked undetected past a recently installed security camera at the settlement’s entrance at midday and attacked two boys separately outside the administration building.

Shlomo Nativ, a bespectacled 13-year-old with the long side curls worn by religious Jews, was struck in the head. He ran into a nearby house coughing blood and died before an ambulance arrived. The other boy, Yair Gamliel, 7, was hospitalized with wounds described as moderate.

Avinoam Maymon, 45, said he tackled the assailant and wrested away the pickax before the man escaped.

Bat Ayin, with a population of 1,000, is notorious as the base of an extremist settler group formed during a Palestinian uprising early in the decade. Three members were convicted of trying to plant an explosive device outside an Arab girls’ school in East Jerusalem in 2002. One of them is the injured boy’s father, Ofer Gamliel, serving a 15-year sentence.

Israeli officials said it was unclear whether the attack was meant specifically to provoke the new government. A little-known group calling itself the Martyrs of Imad Mughniyah claimed responsibility in e-mails to news organizations.

Mughniyah was a Hezbollah commander killed in Syria last year by what is widely believed to be an Israeli assassination squad. But Israeli officials believe his name has been used by known militant groups to avoid Israeli reprisals.

Thursday’s attack could exacerbate the rising tensions in the region over Israel’s shift to the right from its previous centrist leadership.

Zvi Yehezkeli, who covers Palestinian affairs for Israel’s Channel 10 television, said U.S.-trained Palestinian forces had been effective in controlling militants in the area near the settlement -- until right-wing parties dominated the Israeli election two months ago.

“Now there is a laxness and loosening of motivation” among the security forces, he reported.

Arab-language media have been repeating parts of a bellicose speech that Lieberman made Wednesday, warning that Israeli concessions to Palestinians could lead to war.

The foreign minister made news again Thursday when Israeli police summoned him to the headquarters of the national fraud squad for more than seven hours of questioning in a long-standing investigation of his business dealings.

Lieberman denies any wrongdoing and says that the inquiry is politically motivated. He faces allegations of receiving bribes, laundering money and breaching the public trust, but has not been indicted.

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boudreaux@latimes.com