Settlements Issue: Up Close and Personal in the Occupied Territories : Israel: The Jewish communities in the West Bank and Gaza will be a key topic for Baker and Levy today.

In this dry and rocky landscape at the southern lip of the West Bank, the oft-repeated claim from Washington that Israeli settlements create obstacles to peace was given stark meaning by the sudden, merciless end to the life of Mahmoud Nawajah, a Palestinian shepherd.

When U.S. officials repeatedly condemn the settlement program, which so far has dotted the landscape of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with more than 140 communities, they mean that the settlement program is making compromise between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as with Arab states, a practical impossibility.

It’s an issue that will undoubtedly be aired today when Secretary of State James A. Baker III meets in Washington with David Levy, Israel’s foreign minister, to discuss the fading prospects for Middle East peace talks.

While the obstacle-to-peace complaint appears sometimes to be a diplomatic abstract when expressed in Washington, here it takes on a deadly personal form. The competition for land is as real as the unwashed blood stains on a hillside, left undisturbed by the rainless climate and gentle winds of early summer.

Mahmoud Nawajah was attracted to the scene of his death by shots and shouts for help from an elderly farmer, Jabbar Hamed Nawajah, and his son, who belong to the same extended clan as Mahmoud Nawajah. The pair were herding sheep last Friday among the balding hillcrests about five miles from the town of Yatta and less than two miles from Sussiya, a small Israeli settlement to the east.

A settler, identified in Israeli press reports as Baruch Yellin, approached and told the farmer to leave on the grounds that the grass-poor pasture belonged to Sussiya.

The Palestinian refused; the land, he said, belonged to his family, and he had grazed it for years.

The settler returned to Sussiya, according to Israeli and Palestinian accounts, only to return bearing an M-16 rifle. He began shooting sheep and, by Palestinian count, killed 10.

Mahmoud Nawajah, 55, was tending his flock at an encampment a few hundred yards away, and he came running to aid his relative.

At this point, the Palestinian and Israeli accounts differ sharply.

Yellin, from a ridge behind a stone fence, took aim at Mahmoud Nawajah and shot him as he climbed from a valley below, the Palestinians charged. Yellin methodically inspected the fallen shepherd by kicking him with his boot before retiring to Sussiya, the irate townspeople added.

“Where is the justice in this, when a man can shoot another for nothing?” asked Jabbar Nawajah, who spoke at a wake for the slain shepherd.

The Palestinians charged that Sussiya settlers have been routinely sabotaging their rudimentary crops grown on postage-stamp valleys between the hills. A few weeks ago, settlers bulldozed the protective stone covering of a well belonging to the Nawajahs, said Mohammed Nawajah, a son of Jabbar, as he took reporters on a tour of the scene.

The settlers also chopped down olive trees planted to give shade to small plots of cucumbers and tobacco, he added, as he displayed the pattern of bulldozer treads in the dirt and the mutilated trees in the truck gardens.

“They want to expel us from here and take this land, so they can’t stand to see us planting,” Mohammed Nawajah said in anger.

No one from Sussiya, whose hundred residents tend sheep, grow barley and raise flowers in greenhouses, would speak to reporters. But Naom Arnon, a spokesman for Gush Emunim, a settlement movement supporting Yellin, said Sussiya settlers told him that perhaps a dozen Palestinians bore down on Yellin and that he “felt himself in danger.”

“He warned them by shooting at the sheep,” Arnon said, “but they kept coming. At last, he had to do something.”

Arnon claimed that Palestinians from Yatta had made several attacks on Sussiya, destroying storehouses and grain. He blamed the government for failing to detail the precise boundaries of Palestinian land. “The Arabs plant little trees and try to claim it as their own. If we uproot the trees, then we are blamed for vandalism,” Arnon said.

Yellin was jailed pending a police probe. Arnon complained that Palestinians should be held for investigation, too, because of the alleged attack on the settler. “Is there no rule of law in this country?” he asked.

Israel has stepped up land seizures this year in preparation for new settlements or to expand the limits of existing settlements. According to a report by the Coordinating Committee of International Nongovernment Organizations, a group of relief agencies, the confiscations totaled 7,500 acres in March and April, while another 10,000 acres were sealed off for future confiscation.

Israeli officials say that the takeovers are nothing new and that the land is generally barren. During the 24 years Israel has controlled the land, which it occupied during the 1967 Middle East War, the government has extended direct government control of the land from about 15% to almost half.

Last year, the Israeli population of the West Bank and Gaza grew by 13,000 to more than 100,000. About 2,500 of the fresh residents were Soviet immigrants who settled there despite government pledges made under American pressure that the subsidized housing on the disputed land would not go to the newcomers. About 1.7 million Palestinians live on the land.

Traditionally, Palestinians fully cultivate lands in fertile valleys where water is available, but they may only periodically plant where water is scarce and the soil requires a long time to reinvigorate itself.

Grazing takes place over large areas on terrain that was traditionally common ground belonging to clans or villages with the permission of past governments, including the Turkish, British and Jordanian regimes. An official in the Israel Lands Authority said she did not know precisely whether the area where the Nawajahs were herding their sheep belonged to the settlement or to the townspeople.

Within a few days after the shooting of Mahmoud Nawajah, Palestinian shepherds could be seen following their flocks to within a few hundred yards of Sussiya, steering clear only of the hillside where he died and the adjacent rise where sheep were felled by rifle shots.