Israeli Settler Stabbed by Palestinians : Mideast: The West Bank attack, in which the man was presumed killed, raises fears of a terrorist campaign to drive Israelis from occupied territories.

An Israeli settler was stabbed in the neck, abducted and presumed killed by three masked Palestinian gunmen Friday in an attack that raised fears among other settlers of a terrorist campaign to drive them from their West Bank communities.

The settler, whose identity was withheld by Israeli authorities, was buying eggs at a chicken farm outside Ramallah along the main road north from Jerusalem, local residents said, when the masked men jumped him, stabbed him, then bundled him into his car and drove off.

“They tried to cut his throat, right then and there, and blood was everywhere,” said a Palestinian woman who had also been buying eggs. “These men had been waiting for him, and they wanted to kill him. Why, I don’t know . . . but he was a Jew and a settler.”

Israeli troops launched a massive search that continued late into the night, a military spokeswoman said. It failed to locate the man, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Beit El.

“Settlers’ blood is cheap,” Pinhas Wallerstein, head of the regional council of Israeli settlements on the West Bank, said as the soldiers searched for the man. “How many of us will die in the name of this so-called ‘peace’ I don’t know, but I fear it will indeed be many.”

Local Palestinians said they suspected that members of the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, were responsible. Hamas has vowed to continue its attacks on Israel’s civilian settlers, as well as its troops, until all withdraw from territories occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

“In Hamas’ ideology, there is no essential distinction between a soldier who takes and holds territory and a farmer who cultivates and profits from that land,” a senior Israeli official acknowledged. “We have more than 125,000 of our people (the West Bank settlers) out there at serious, serious risk every day now. . . . The fanatics would like to pick them off, one by one. Each settler becomes for us a hostage to the peace process.”

Coming after the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, the attack heightened fears among the settlers of a terrorist campaign targeted at them. The Beit El settler had reportedly been telephoned by a Palestinian farmer and invited to buy eggs at below-market prices.

By midafternoon Friday, scores of settlers from Beit El and other Israeli communities on the West Bank had streamed into the area, blocking the main highway north from Jerusalem, shooting into the air, stoning Arab cars and setting three vehicles on fire in their anger. They also rampaged through the nearby Arab refugee camp of Jalazoun, stoning cars and homes.

Border police and troops, called to clear the road and restore order, fought with protesters, arresting at least six. Military commanders declared the area a “closed military zone,” and soldiers ordered journalists to leave at gunpoint.

Wallerstein said the settler’s abduction demonstrated the deterioration in security for Jews on the West Bank since last month’s peace agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

A member of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Cabinet, speaking before the attack, said that some of the more than 140 Israeli settlements in the occupied territories would have to be dismantled for peace--but, first of all, because of their vulnerability.

“If there are settlements in areas densely populated with Arabs, I don’t think that we can say that in the permanent solution it is in our interest to keep them,” Economics Minister Shimon Shetreet said.