War Adds to Gloom in West Bank Town : Palestinians: Dreams of independence from Israel suffer another setback as allied drive jolts their champion, Hussein.

Probably few towns in the West Bank or Gaza Strip were as bitterly reflective the day the allied ground war began as Beit Sahur, a community that has sacrificed four lives and scores of livelihoods to the fading dreams of quick independence from Israel.

Residents groped Sunday for news of some Iraqi success against the U.S.-led onslaught and cast disbelieving looks at suggestions that their distant hero, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and his army would collapse.

But the feeling that Iraq would fall was inescapable and with it enthusiastic hopes harbored by many Palestinians that an Arab strongman would arise to aid their nationalist cause.

“We have had these setbacks before,” said Yacoub, a 30-year-old neighborhood activist. “For 40 years, we have had our hopes wounded and we continue. Ours is a profession of carrying on.”

The gloomy mood was deepened by a week’s army-imposed curfew and by the prolonged mourning for a 14-year-old boy, shot in the head and killed in his living room Monday by an Israeli settler who police said shot at the house from the street with a submachine gun.

The victim, Salaam Musleh, a student at a local Roman Catholic school who had a reputation as a hot-shot basketball player, was walking by a kitchen door when a single bullet blasted through the window and struck him in the head. His mother turned from her chores at the stove to find him lying in blood.

Palestinian witnesses said the settler, identified as Boaz Moscowitz, from the militantly nationalist settlement of Tekoa, got out of his car to remove stones strewn in the street, took out the machine gun, fired at rooftop cisterns and into the Musleh house.

A witness took police to Tekoa to identify the car. The bullet removed from the boy’s head matched Moscowitz’s weapon. According to newspaper reports, Moscowitz said he didn’t know he had hit anyone. He has not yet been charged with a crime.

Musleh was the fifth Palestinian shot to death by soldiers or settlers since the Gulf War broke out Jan. 17; on Friday, a 15-year-old was killed by soldiers near Hebron. In the same period, two Israelis have died from the impact of 36 missile barrages fired from Iraq on Israeli cities.

Over coffee at a wake for Musleh on Sunday, murmurs of sympathy were mixed with outbursts of recrimination aimed at the United States for its support of Israel and the battering of Iraq.

“Even if they defeat Saddam militarily, this has become a war between the U.S. and the Arab nation,” said Nasri Qumsiyeh, a physician and Musleh’s uncle. “They will pay. Bush is mad. The American people are mad. Does the United States own the world? Then what is the rent? We have nothing more to lose. We will get revenge.”

Qumsiyeh dismissed suggestions that Hussein, by offering to withdraw unconditionally from Kuwait, had betrayed the Palestinians he had championed by linking an Iraqi settlement of the Kuwait issue with the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank and Gaza.

“It is Israel that makes the link. We could not even have a proper funeral for Salaam because of the war,” Qumsiyeh said of the teen-ager, who was buried at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, with only a limited number of relatives permitted to attend.

Israel placed a curfew on much of the West Bank in the last few days in anticipation that Palestinians would take to the streets in support of Iraq. Beit Sahur, a largely middle-class town of 20,000, has been sealed up since Monday, with residents allowed out for two hours only Saturday to buy groceries.

Elsewhere in the town, there was more becalmed contemplation of the losses endured by the Palestinians for their support of Iraq. The comments suggested a sobering view of the war’s costs and stood in sharp contrast to the euphoric exclamations of support for Hussein commonly heard among Palestinians in the occupied land and in Jordan.

“Frankly, we have lost a lot,” said Walid, a local uprising leader, who lamented that Hussein surrendered the Kuwait-Palestinian linkage as he sought a negotiated exit from Kuwait.

Walid listed some of the costs to the Palestinians: the loss of expatriate jobs in Kuwait, where tens of thousands earned a living and sent checks to their West Bank and Gaza hometowns; the enmity of anti-Iraq Arab governments, and the discrediting of the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose leader Yasser Arafat wholeheartedly supported Hussein. In addition, what pained Walid was the squandering of public sympathy garnered in the three-year intifada , the uprising that has mainly pitted Palestinian youths with stones against armed Israeli soldiers.