Israeli Beach Attack Closes Week of Violence : Raid: Palestinians kill security guard. Recent deaths cast shadow on upcoming elections.

A week that highlighted Israel’s chronic condition of no war, no peace came to a violent close Saturday when Palestinian commandos from Jordan swam across a narrow bay and fatally shot a civilian Israeli security guard on the resort beach at Eilat before soldiers and police fired back, killing one of the raiders and wounding a second.

The two were trying to set up a short-range missile launcher when they were foiled. Two other would-be infiltrators were believed to have drowned, having failed to complete the three-mile crossing, Israel radio said.

The violent week included the death of a 15-year-old Israeli schoolgirl slain by a Palestinian wielding a knife, the deaths of a soldier and three Palestinians in a Gaza shootout, the fatal stabbing of an Israeli rabbi in Gaza, an ambush that killed an Israeli soldier in Lebanon and resulted in Israeli air raids on Lebanese villages and, on Saturday, the deaths of two Palestinian collaborators, mistakenly shot by Israeli security agents.

The events have shadowed the current national election campaign with ill feeling. Little enthusiasm and a lot of hostility have been shown toward the two leading candidates, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of the Likud Party and challenger Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor Party.

“Today we aren’t weak, and still our blood is spilled . . . and there’s no leadership, no policy, just a feeling that everything is breaking up,” Yediot Aharonot, the country’s largest-selling newspaper, said in an editorial.

The raid on Eilat was carried out by Muslim fundamentalists, Israel government radio said. The raiders carried rifles, grenades, a missile and a copy of the Koran into Israel, the radio said.

They swam ashore on the Gulf of Aqaba shortly before 7 a.m. and killed a 62-year-old security guard at a marine attraction. With police and soldiers in pursuit, the infiltrators fled to the hills but were cut off. Townspeople in Eilat, population 30,000, were told to stay indoors for two hours during the emergency.

“They kept shooting at us and throwing grenades. . . . The bullets just whizzed by us,” said skin diver Shai Bar-Am, who hid under boats on the beach as the raiders approached.

Military officials blamed Jordan for not halting the infiltrators on its side of the bay.

“We see Jordan as the accountable party that must make a supreme effort to prevent terrorist activities from its territory,” army Chief of Staff Ehud Barak said.

Jordan has been the launching point for several cross-border raids since October, 1990, when 18 Palestinians died during a melee with police at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. However, since the end of the Persian Gulf War, Jordan has kept tight control of its frontiers, Israeli officials said.

Beyond Israel’s northern frontier with Lebanon, Jerusalem’s conflict with Muslim guerrillas continued without break. Israeli troops shelled Lebanese villages in response to a rocket attack on the Israeli-patrolled buffer zone north of the border.

The mistaken shooting of two Arab collaborators took place in the northern part of the West Bank, a military spokesman said. The pair drew guns on a car bearing a blue license plate that denotes Arab ownership. However, the car was carrying Israeli undercover agents, who fired first.

The spokesman could not confirm reports that the collaborators were setting an ambush for Palestinian activists. Israel permits Palestinian collaborators to carry arms.