Riots Erupt in Wake of Mosque Massacre in W. Bank; 60 Dead : Israel: More than 300 are wounded overall as clashes turn day into bloodiest since 1967 war. Gunman, a Brooklyn-born Jewish settler, is killed by worshipers. Rabin calls slaughter a ‘loathsome’ act. Peace process in jeopardy.

Riots broke out across the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip on Friday, leaving at least a dozen people dead, as Palestinians protested the dawn massacre by a Jewish settler of 48 Muslims as they prayed in a mosque in Hebron, south of Jerusalem.

More than 300 people were wounded throughout the day, scores during the massacre at the mosque and the rest in clashes that followed there, in other West Bank towns, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem’s Old City, according to figures compiled from hospital reports.

The day was the bloodiest in the occupied territories since Israel captured them during the 1967 Middle East War, and the carnage put in jeopardy the negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization on limited Palestinian self-rule.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called the attack “a loathsome criminal act of murder,” and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat warned of “a very negative backfire on the whole peace process.”

Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born physician in Kiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement on the outskirts of Hebron, burst into the Ibrahim Mosque in the Cave of the Patriarchs during the early morning service Friday and opened fire on the more than 600 Muslims praying there. The shrine is holy to both Jews and Muslims as the burial place of Abraham.

Methodically reloading his assault rifle with extra magazines, Goldstein fired for more than 10 minutes, according to witnesses, and killed or wounded more than a third of the congregation, including a number of children.

Unchecked by the five Israeli soldiers guarding the shrine, Goldstein was finally subdued by survivors and beaten to death with an iron bar, witnesses said. Anticipating his likely death, Goldstein had left a farewell note at the Kiryat Arba municipal offices, declaring his “love of Israel.”

Active in the extremist Kach movement, Goldstein had apparently come to view Palestinians as “Arab Nazis” determined to destroy Israel.

“We were in the midst of the prayers when I heard shots and saw the head of the man in front of me explode,” said Hamad abu Shareh, 52, a hardware store owner. “Then I saw others hit--in their backs, in their heads, in their chests as they turned--and blood was spraying everywhere.

“As I turned, I saw this Jew with a kippa (skullcap), a black beard like those that settlers wear and in an army uniform, and he was firing and firing and firing, using his gun like a hose.”

Suleiman abu Saleh, 33, the guard of the mosque, said the gunman “was trying to kill as many as possible. He would fire until his (ammunition clip) was empty, come out and reload and go in again to fire.”

After the attack, Rabin telephoned Arafat to express his sorrow. “As an Israeli, I am ashamed of this deed,” he told the PLO leader.

“This is a difficult day for all those, Jews and Arabs, who seek peace,” Rabin said in a statement. “However, the crazed actions of disturbed individuals will not prevent the reconciliations between citizens of the state of Israel and the Palestinian people.

“We will do everything necessary to advance the peace talks, to prevent misunderstandings, to remove obstacles in the way and to reach, together, the day of peace--the day on which extremists on both sides will lose all hope of damaging the peace process.”

Palestinian leaders in reply demanded that Rabin disarm the 130,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, pull his forces out of the areas that will become autonomous under the peace accord and accelerate the transition to self-rule. The PLO also called for an international peacekeeping force for the region.

“This atrocity proves there is no need to defend the settlers from the Palestinians but a need to defend the Palestinians from the settlers,” said Faisal Husseini, the principal PLO figure on the West Bank. He warned that the Hebron massacre would have “a very negative impact” on the peace talks.

At an emergency Cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv, dovish ministers from Rabin’s Labor Party and its leftist partner, Meretz, also called for disarming the settlers, outlawing Kach and other extreme right-wing groups, dismantling Israeli settlements in and around Hebron and pulling Israeli forces back to their bases to avoid further clashes.

Rabin ordered that Kiryat Arba residents not be allowed to enter or leave their community without military permission, and he put Jewish residents of Hebron under round-the-clock curfew; he said he will consider the other suggestions over the weekend and raise them at the regular Cabinet meeting Sunday.

“I warned for months that eventually something like this (massacre) would happen,” said Immigration Minister Yair Tsaban, a Meretz member, renewing his demand that Kach be banned. “The writing was on the wall.”

Kach leaders praised Goldstein as a “holy hero who was killed for the glory of God.”

“Dr. Goldstein, a Jew who treated dozens of victims of Arab terror with his sympathetic hands, saw and felt every day the savagery of the Arabs who wounded and murdered Jews whose only sin was their Jewishness,” the group said, accusing the Rabin government of failing to protect settlers.

Baruch Marzel, a Kach leader who lives in Hebron, added, “We would have been a lot happier with the whole thing if Dr. Goldstein, a righteous man, was not killed. With him dead, we cannot be happy.”

The slain Palestinians “were not innocent,” Marzel said, accusing them of being in the crowd Thursday evening that had chanted “Death to the Jews” during services at the Cave of the Patriarchs marking the Jewish festival of Purim.

In Kiryat Arba, the municipal council expressed its “regret” over the massacre but pointedly did not condemn the attack.

“The blame must be directed at the government of Israel and its head, Prime Minister and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who is abandoning security, (leading to) all the unending acts of murder in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, especially since negotiations with the PLO began,” the council said.

Goldstein’s friends in Kiryat Arba and Hebron suggested that the father of four had suffered an emotional breakdown after members of a fundamentalist Islamic group, Hamas, gunned down a close friend, Mordechai Lapid, and his son in December.

“After the murders of the Lapid family, he was in crisis, a mental crisis,” Noam Arnon said. “We could see that this incident took him out of his normal balance.”

Several groups, all previously unknown, claimed in telephone calls to Israeli and international news organizations that they had executed the attack. One said the intent was to drive Palestinians out of Hebron, another said it was to avenge the 1990 New York murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane, Kach’s founder, and a third said it was a response to recent murders of settlers.

But most Israelis, including those sympathetic to the settlers’ efforts to reclaim all the territory that was part of the biblical Land of Israel, reacted with horror to the Hebron killings and the subsequent violence.

Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud Party, strongly condemned the attack as “a terrifying and abominable crime.” “I call for restraint by all (in Hebron), Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, everyone,” he said. “We are all sitting in the same boat. We cannot drill holes in the bottom.”

Angry protests broke out almost immediately in Hebron as relatives and friends besieged the city’s two hospitals, townspeople said, and clashed with troops. One man was shot and killed by soldiers in front of one of the hospitals, according to the Palestine Human Rights Information Center here.

Three men were killed in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, according to military sources, as troops sought to curtail protests. The region was closed by the Israeli military commander, preventing Palestinians from crossing into Israel.

In Beit Jala, south of Jerusalem, settlers shot and killed a Palestinian after their bus was stoned. Two deaths were reported at the Kalandiyeh refugee camp north of Jerusalem, another in Nablus and four in a clash in Kufr Qaleel, a town south of Nablus.

In Jerusalem, police battled rock-throwing Palestinian youths in the Old City for more than six hours after midday prayers at Al Aqsa mosque. The clash began as youths pelted Jews praying below at the Western Wall of the old temple with rocks, driving them away. Police responded with volleys of tear-gas grenades and rubber bullets.

An 18-year-old Palestinian was fatally wounded during police pursuit of demonstrators through the Old City’s maze of narrow streets, alleys and stairways, and more than 60 others were treated at Jerusalem hospitals for gunshot wounds and other injuries.

In the Israeli town of Kfar Sava, an elderly American immigrant, Morris Eisenstat, 80, a retired New York policeman and a member of Israel’s volunteer civil guard, was hacked to death with an ax as he sat in the sun on his customary park bench reading the paper.

Times researcher Dianna M. Cahn in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

* HEALER, KILLER: Baruch Goldstein was a doctor with extremist views. A6

* RELATED STORIES: A8, B1