Israeli Girl, 2 Arabs Killed on West Bank : Teen-Ager Stoned to Death, 14 Others Hurt in Attack by Villagers

A 15-year-old Israeli girl was stoned to death by villagers and two Palestinian youths were killed by gunfire from settlers on Wednesday in one of the most potentially inflammatory incidents in four months of violence in the occupied territories.

At least two other Palestinians were wounded and 14 Jews, most of them teen-agers, were injured in the clash, which reportedly began with a traditional Passover hike through nearby hills and ended in death in this town of 3,000 near Nablus.

The girl, identified as Tirza Porat of the West Bank Jewish settlement of Elon Moreh, was the first civilian Israeli casualty directly related to the Palestinian uprising, which began Dec. 9. One Israeli soldier has also been killed, along with at least 134 Palestinians.

Incident of ‘Unequaled Gravity’

The Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, said Wednesday night in an interview on Israeli Television that the incident was of “unequaled gravity.” He appealed to the 70,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied territories “to avoid any independent action in revenge,” saying that “this is the job of the (army).”

Hundreds of troops sealed off Beita and rounded up all men in the village for questioning. Journalists were prevented from entering or interviewing residents for an independent account of the incident.

Reporters who arrived at about dusk found soldiers blocking the narrow main road to Elon Moreh to prevent armed and angry settlers from descending on the Arab village.

“It was a collective doing, so there must be collective punishment,” a bearded man told journalists as he sat in one of about 20 cars jammed up trying to leave the settlement. The incident, he said, “shows that the Arabs are bloodthirsty, vicious people who can’t be trusted. They show only cruelty.”

Helped Hide Youths

However, Shomron said some Arab villagers had helped hide a few of the youths when they came under attack, while others telephoned for ambulances to assist the injured.

Many details of the incident remained unclear Wednesday. The army, youths who survived the attack and American television crews who were on the scene well before the military gave this general account:

Sixteen youths, mostly from Elon Moreh, accompanied by two armed guards, set out Wednesday morning on a traditional Passover nature walk through the lush, hilly countryside. They took vehicles to a point near the village of Usarin, just south of Elon Moreh, and planned to hike back to the settlement.

In the hills just east of Beita they were attacked by Arab youths who showered them with stones, some from slingshots. The two guards fired in the air in an attempt to frighten the attackers, but this had no effect and the group was soon surrounded.

The accounts are not clear on what happened next. One of the injured youths, Shmuel Fuchs, 16, told Israel Television in an interview from a bed in Tel Hashomer Hospital in Tel Aviv that one of the Arab youths tried to snatch a weapon from one of the guards and that the guard shot him.

Briefing reporters at the scene here, the West Bank military commander, Maj. Gen. Amram Mitzna, said the Arab casualties were caused by settler gunfire, but the sequence of events was unclear. “I can’t tell you if it was in or if it was outside the village,” he said.

The hikers were apparently either forced or lured into Beita by their attackers, and when they reached the center of town they were set upon by an angry mob, reportedly including women.

Porat was felled by a rock. “I saw her head open up. . . . It was terrible,” another youth, Rami Hoffman, said later. One of the guards, Roman Aldubi, 26, was knocked down by a rock and his weapon taken, Hoffman said. Aldubi was operated on Wednesday night and was reported in serious condition.

Shomron emphasized in the television interview that none of the injured Jewish youths were wounded by gunfire.

“They did not use live ammunition,” he said of the Arab villagers.

Mitzna said that when the army arrived it found an Uzi machine gun carried by one of the guards broken into pieces on the ground, along with a piece of the M-16 rifle carried by the other guard.

A cameraman for CBS News, Neville Harris, said that he and his crew were assigned to the Nablus area Wednesday and that they happened upon an ambulance racing toward the village. The crew followed.

“We got there about 10 minutes or so after it all went down,” Harris said. “We saw these bodies on the ground and the blood in the ambulances.”

Film on Israeli Television on Wednesday night showed terrified youngsters, many of them spattered with blood, milling around the ambulances in a narrow and otherwise apparently empty village street.

“Enough! Enough!” one girl in the group shouted, weeping.

A boy who appeared to be about 16 years old, who was also crying, shouted to an unknown friend: “Come! Come and ride with Tirza.”

Two stretcher bearers and a third youth carried the dead girl’s body to one of the ambulances.

“When the ambulances left, there were three Jewish children left in the village that didn’t know what to do,” cameraman Harris said. “There was no army. We were the only people there.”

The three children--a girl about 14, a boy of perhaps 12 and a youth in his late teens, with half his face covered with blood--said they thought one of their group was missing, held captive by the villagers.

“We waited with them to see if we could find him, and then we saw a lot of Arabs coming back into the village,” Harris said. “They started pointing at us and saying in Arabic: ‘You’re Jewish.’ We got scared and we left. We took the three (Jewish children) out with us.”

Shomron said later that one youth had been taken captive by the villagers but managed to escape.

Palestinian sources said the two Palestinians were killed when settlers, without provocation, attacked Beita villagers as they worked in their fields. The dead were identified as Mousa Saleh Bani Shamseh, 20, and Hatem Fayez, 22.

The Palestinians offered no explanation of why such an attack would involve schoolchildren. On the other hand, the army had no clear explanation for how the two Palestinians were killed and two others wounded unless it happened outside the village, before the hikers were led into Beita.

One of the two Jewish guards was identified by Israeli journalists who specialize in West Bank coverage as a well-known extremist who was banned from Nablus by the army last year after he had been involved in a number of provocative incidents involving Arab residents there.

Shomron said on Israeli Television that the group had not informed the army of its plans to hike in the area--a step that Mitzna had previously told reporters was recommended in light of the unrest.

Asked by an Israel Radio reporter why the youngsters had been allowed to take the hike despite the unrest, Shoshana Eilan, the mother of one of the injured, said it was because this is their home. “If our children can’t travel and can’t walk around the area where they live, that’s bad,” she said.

Shomron and Mitzna visited Elon Moreh to try and cool settlers’ tempers Wednesday evening.

“The ball is in your court now,” settlement leader Benny Katzover told the army officers. “What is needed is something of such scope it will make it clear to the Arabs that Jews are not to be killed.”

Other settlers urged mass deportations of Arabs and orders to the army to shoot at stone throwers. Regulations currently permit them to open fire only if their lives are in danger and after a series of warnings.

Shomron promised that the army “will react in a very serious way to what happened.”

Residents of Elon Moreh prevented journalists from entering the settlement Wednesday evening.