Hatred Still Rampant in Tense Israel : Intifada: The drumbeat of violence and counter-violence is numbing for Jew and Arab alike.

The past week, on the surface, was hardly notable in the grinding course of the Arab uprising against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: two Palestinians dead in actions involving troops, four Palestinians killed by fellow Arabs on suspicion of informing for Israeli authorities. It was a week like others, more or less, although the numbers sometimes flip-flop.

Yet, there was a quality to the turbulence that perhaps typifies the day-to-day process of deepened hatred in a part of the world where one might believe hatred had long ago bottomed out.

These were the kinds of vignettes that enter the fearful lore of the Israelis and Palestinians as they battle over the land. The stories may not be big news; the drumbeat of violence and counter-violence is so numbing that such incidents become like background music--insistent but faint. But sooner or later, it seems everyone is humming along.

The tone of the week perhaps was set last Saturday in the Gaza Strip refugee camp of Shati where soldiers raided the home of Mohammed abu Zinada, an elderly Muslim cleric. The troops were looking for boys who threw stones at soldiers staffing a roadblock.

Abu Zinada, who is blind, tried to shield his 9-year-old grandson, Naim, from the pursuing troops. He collapsed and died on top of the boy as the soldiers tried to pull them apart, family members said.

“Saliva came out of his mouth. The soldier stopped and called a doctor,” said Abu Zinada’s wife, Kaja.

Hussein, a 30-year-old retarded son, came out and started screaming and one of the soldiers hit him in the collarbone with a rifle butt, she said.

“As they left, one of the soldiers said, ‘Allah gives and Allah takes away,’ ” Kaja Zinada recalled.

The army said the cleric had died of a heart attack, that there was no “physical contact” by the soldiers and that a medic tried to resuscitate him. In the days afterward, youths in the neighborhood said that Abu Zinada’s death was heroic because the soldiers had stopped searching for fleeing youths when he died.

In the current climate, the dead are not immune from enmity. Early Sunday, vandals used hammers and picks to destroy 80 tombstones in the American section of a Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. No arrests have been made.

“This act of vandalism, which no civilized person can tolerate, undermines the development of the Jewish-Arab understanding and calm that we strive for,” said the city’s mayor, Teddy Kollek.

Nor are the newly born easily kept out of harm’s way. On Tuesday, soldiers threw gas grenades into a U.N. health clinic in the city of Gaza where scores of mothers had taken their infants for weekly checkups. Sixty-six babies were treated for gas inhalation at nearby Nasser Hospital. Nine were hospitalized for breathing difficulties and dizziness.

At the hospital two days later, the nine were still blinking uncontrollably and breathing heavily from the effects of the gas. One of the babies had been trampled and bruised during the rush of mothers to escape the fumes, said Shawa Raghida, a spokesman for the hospital.

A U.N. official at the clinic said that Palestinian boys sometimes throw stones from the roof of the clinic. The compound is walled and the gas canisters were tossed over them from outside.

The army announced that one officer charged with ordering the attack had been sentenced to 10 days in jail. When the officer appealed for leniency, his commander reduced the punishment to a 21-day suspended sentence.

Although brutality by Palestinians in the killing of suspected collaborators has become commonplace, an execution in Jenin, at the northern edge of West Bank, seemed to set a new standard. Residents and soldiers there found the decapitated body of Ibrahim Fahmawi, who was accused by Palestinian militants of dealing drugs and informing for the Israeli authorities.

During his funeral Thursday, masked youths carrying megaphones warned against attending his burial.

Three other suspected collaborators were beaten and stabbed to death last weekend despite repeated calls by underground Palestinian leaders to stop the executions.

In the 31 months of the Arab revolt against Israeli rule, about 230 Palestinians have died at the hands of other Palestinians. More than 650 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops and civilians. Palestinians have killed about 45 Israelis.

In Jerusalem, events seemed to reach a crescendo when a 12-year-old Jewish boy was stabbed while waiting for a bus in the city’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood. The attacker was probably a man dressed in woman’s clothing, police said. The boy, Idan Mizrahi, was hospitalized and will be released Sunday. Newspaper pictures of the hospitalized boy showed the knife sticking out of his back with its handle protected by plastic to preserve fingerprints.

It was the second stabbing of a Jewish youth in the city during the week, but this one enraged Jewish residents who stormed the nearby Arab neighborhood of Sur Bahir yelling “Death to Arabs!” as they burned brush and threw stones through windows.

“We simply need to teach the Arabs a lesson so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again,” one protester told Israel Radio.

“We are going to give them a bit of a fright,” added another.

In turn, Sur Bahir erupted in anger and Arabs began to burn tires and throw stones back. On Friday, police set up water cannons on connecting streets to keep the two communities apart.

It is well known that the violence from the West Bank and Gaza is having an impact in Israel, but one tale in particular seemed especially riveting in its seemingly innocuous beginnings.

A supermarket worker, Hassan abu Zaaluk, was pushing shopping carts at a store in Lod when he bumped an Israeli stranger. An incident that in some places might pass with a few heated words became a cause for mayhem here.

The jostled man called five friends and they dragged Abu Zaaluk from the store and beat him. An Israeli witness tried to intervene and was dragged off along with Abu Zaaluk to a police station. According to an account in the Jerusalem Post, one of the men who hit Abu Zaaluk was present at the station, where police tried to get Abu Zaaluk to sign a paper saying that he was not beaten up.

Abu Zaaluk suffered a punctured eardrum, according to a hospital report. The Assn. for Civil Rights in Israel is filing a complaint with police, saying it was the second such incident this month.