Israelis Kill 3 More Palestinians in West Bank

Israeli troops shot and killed three Palestinian youths in the West Bank in surging violence that has left 10 Arabs dead in the occupied territories since Friday.

Troops killed one teen-ager Sunday night in the village of Toubas during a demonstration in support of Gaza Palestinians and killed two Monday in the nearby village of Tamoun during stone-throwing protests against the arrest of a wanted man.

Human rights activists have expressed alarm at the rising death toll--the bloodiest four days in more than two years--and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was asked about it at a meeting of his Labor Party.

But according to an official who briefed reporters on Rabin’s response, the hard-line former general said soldiers did not have the powers they need. “They have a feeling that they don’t have all the tools,” Rabin was quoted as saying.

The prime minister told his party that the army had eased the rules for entering houses where it believed wanted men were hiding: “First we inquire, then we warn and then we shoot.”

He did not say what the previous procedures were.

In the 54 days since Rabin expelled hundreds of Palestinians to Lebanon, Israeli troops have killed 41 Arabs in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In Jerusalem, hundreds of Palestinians marched in the funeral of two prominent Palestinians.

Police security was heavy at the march in East Jerusalem since mass marches by Palestinians normally have been forbidden during the five-year uprising against Israeli occupation. No violence was reported.

The funeral was for Saad a Din al Alami, Islamic religious leader of Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, and Anwar Khatib, governor of Jerusalem under Jordanian rule before Israel seized the city’s Arab sector in the 1967 Middle East war.

Among those at the funeral were Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek and a delegation of Jordanian officials who crossed the Allenby Bridge into the West Bank.

Schoolchildren in uniforms and Boy Scouts carried dozens of wreaths, including one from “the President of Palestine, Yasser Arafat,” whose Palestine Liberation Organization is banned in Israel.

Alami, who died Saturday at age 87, helped establish the Islamic High Council after Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem. Khatib, who died at age 76 on Sunday, also was an adviser to the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to the U.S.-backed peace talks in 1991.

Khatib and Alami were buried at the Martyrs Cemetery outside the site of Jerusalem’s major Islamic monuments. The area is known as the Temple Mount to Jews, since it contains the last remnant of the ancient Jewish temple.