Violence Flares Anew in Occupied Lands

An outbreak of bloodshed on Friday and Saturday interrupted an appearance that the Arab uprising in the occupied territories is all but over and highlighted its increasingly desperate nature.

There were five fatalities related to the uprising. On Saturday, the body of an Israeli settler on the West Bank was found hidden in his van, his body covered with knife wounds. The settler had been missing since Friday. Soldiers sealed the area near the Jordanian border Saturday and hunted for suspects on foot and by helicopter.

The night before, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 15-year-old stone thrower in a village not far from Jerusalem.

Two Palestinians were killed by other Arabs after being accused of spying for the Israeli authorities. One was shot in broad daylight in the bustling vegetable market in Al Birah, a town 10 miles from Jerusalem. A shadowy group of fugitive Palestinians called the Black Panthers killed a 63-year-old man in the village of Arabe, saying that he confessed to recruiting young informers for Israel.

Finally, in a Gaza Strip refugee camp, a Palestinian blew himself up with a bomb he was preparing, Palestinian journalists and Israel radio said.

Since the end of the Persian Gulf War, some Israeli observers have declared that the intifada , the name for the uprising in Arabic, is dead. Palestinian leaders themselves have called for a rethinking of tactics.

Israeli military officials publicly have taken heart that Palestinian streets are progressively quieter and that rallies, both large and small, are extremely rare. But they insist that a “hard core” of activists operates widely and that anti-Israeli action by youthful Palestinians is pointedly destructive. In the past week, masked men burned a bus in the West Bank, and arson attacks on private cars in Jerusalem are commonplace. Shots were fired at an army patrol at least once during the past week, and a 16-year-old Israeli youth was stabbed and wounded in the southern West Bank city of Hebron last Wednesday.

“There is no basis to claims that the intifada is over,” wrote Zeev Schiff, an influential defense commentator in the Haaretz newspaper. Schiff cited an increase in armed attacks by Palestinians, continued “executions” by Palestinians of suspected Palestinian collaborators with Israel and a small but steady toll taken by Israeli troops as proof of the staying power of the revolt.

He argued that the main struggle among Palestinians is over control of the uprising, with leaders trying to find ways to return the rebellion to its original form of mass demonstrations and limited violence.

“The Palestinians don’t want to put an end to the intifada but to change it,” Schiff argued.

Israeli settlers often become involved in violence. On Thursday, Israelis from a West Bank settlement raided a small Palestinian village, shooting up homes with automatic weapons and rifles.

On Saturday, an Arab taxi driver complained that a civilian in a passing car shot at his vehicle as it traveled a West Bank road.