Gunfire Kills 2 Jewish Settlers in West Bank : Terrorism: Police have no suspects in the automatic weapons attack on a civilian bus headed for hard-liners’ rally.

Two Jewish settlers were killed and five others were wounded Monday night in an automatic weapons attack on a civilian bus heading from the West Bank to a rally in Tel Aviv to protest any disbanding of Israeli settlements.

The attack came despite the high state of alert observed by the army and the police.

Authorities have been expecting possible acts of terrorism during the Middle East peace talks that begin Wednesday in Madrid. Hard-line elements of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Muslim fundamentalist group Hamas have threatened violence to demonstrate their staunch opposition to the Madrid talks.

The Jewish settlers are adamant that their controversial new towns, established in Israeli-occupied territories, should not be a negotiable issue at the conference; they have generally opposed any international discussions at all.

Witnesses to the attack Monday said that bursts of automatic weapons fire erupted in the growing darkness. Police had no immediate suspects. A 10-year-old girl was reported critically injured.

Settlers were quoted as blaming the PLO for the attack, and one declared: “How can you sit down with the PLO at a peace table?”

The PLO is not participating directly in the Madrid talks, but many Palestinians are loyal to the group.

The attack occurred about 18 miles north of Jerusalem. There are about 100,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, home to about 1.7 million Palestinians.

Reacting to the attack, Israel’s Religious Affairs Minister Avner Shaki declared: “I am simply horrified. I understand that the terrorist organizations continue with their hatred, their war and their cruelty.”

In Washington, a White House spokesman condemned the “senseless act of violence” and warned that extremist groups “cannot be allowed to succeed in sabotaging the peace process.”

On Monday, three female soldiers also reported that two youths in a pickup truck tried to run them down at a bus stop outside the northern port city of Haifa but missed when they dashed into the transit stop.

On Monday night, right-wing members of Israeli settlements on the West Bank held a demonstration with 30,000 in Tel Aviv, warning against any agreement in Madrid that would result in dismantling the new communities in the occupied territories. It was billed as a counterdemonstration to a protest Saturday that attracted 30,000 people to the same square to endorse the concept of trading land for peace as a way of reaching agreement with the Arabs.

In other developments Monday:

* Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir met with Shimon Peres, leader of the opposition Labor Party. Although Peres has backed the international conference on the Middle East, he has declined to allow any party members to join the official Israeli delegation. Peres reportedly does not want Labor identified with the hard-line, “no-land-for-peace” delegation that Shamir will lead in Madrid.

* In an interview on Cable News Network, Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek declared that Israel should give up territory for peace because “I don’t think we should rule 1.5 million Palestinians. Palestinians should have the right to run themselves.”

* The Israeli government said it has refused exit visas to three Palestinians named as advisers to the Jordanian-Palestinian delegations. They had planned to cross the Jordan River to Amman on Sunday to join the delegation, which departed Monday from the Jordanian capital. The best known of the three, Ziad abu Ein, 31, of Ramallah, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981 for a bomb attack but was released in 1985 in a prisoner exchange. The two others also had prison records, which Israeli officials said disqualified them for exit visas.

* The U.S. ambassador to Jordan, Roger Harrison, was seriously injured in an auto accident just west of Jerusalem when he was driving from Amman to Tel Aviv airport to catch a flight to Madrid, where he was scheduled to attend the talks as an observer. In a head-on collision involving an embassy limousine and an Israeli car, an Israeli woman was killed.