30 Wounded in Protest of Hebron Siege : Mideast: Palestinians riot over Israeli use of firepower against militants in densely populated neighborhood.

Fierce clashes spread through the Israeli-occupied territories Thursday as soldiers shot and wounded at least 30 Palestinians protesting the Israeli military’s fiery two-day siege in the West Bank town of Hebron.

Israel Radio announced that two Israeli soldiers and three civilians were slightly wounded in the rioting and street fights that left more than two dozen Palestinians hospitalized throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The latest round of violence was triggered by a massive Israeli military operation in which 1,500 soldiers fired more than 100 antitank missiles and thousands of rounds of ammunition into a house in Hebron, where four men the army called leaders of an armed Palestinian fundamentalist faction were holed up.

The 22-hour siege, in which a pregnant Palestinian woman was killed in the cross-fire, ended Wednesday evening. Israel’s military censors had blocked news of the battle until Chief of Staff Gen. Ehud Barak announced it at a hearing of the government commission investigating last month’s massacre of about 30 Palestinians in a mosque by an Israeli settler.

Barak said all four militants were killed.

The residential neighborhood of Hebron where the fighting took place, less than a mile from the site of the mosque where the Feb. 25 massacre occurred, was still sealed off by Israeli soldiers Thursday. A bulldozer finished leveling the three-story building where the Palestinians were thought to have been sheltered. Crews began sifting the rubble for bodies.

Angered Palestinians and some Israelis criticized the military for using so much firepower in a densely settled neighborhood. Military leaders, however, continued to hail the Hebron operation as a key victory over armed Palestinian groups that publicly have vowed revenge for the massacre at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, which Jews and Muslims believe is the burial site of the prophet Abraham.

Maj. Gen. Danny Yatom, the military commander of the West Bank, said the army was justified in using “all our powers to ensure (terrorist) cells are wiped out.”

Most of the criticism focused on timing. The army launched the operation just as delegates from Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were convening in Cairo to try to restart talks that could finalize a long-delayed agreement for limited Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank town of Jericho and the Gaza Strip.

The PLO had suspended those negotiations when Brooklyn-born physician Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler who lived near Hebron, opened fire in the mosque at praying Arabs.

In an interview with Israel Radio, the government’s left-leaning Communications Minister Shulamit Aloni roundly condemned the siege.

“I think it was a mistake,” she said. “Even if they got four terrorists, is this how the best army in the Middle East does catch four terrorists? . . . If Israel wants to push the peace process forward, we have to get it into our heads once and for all that, in our relations with the Palestinians, we are not the victims. We are the rulers. We are the occupiers.”

There was little optimism for the Cairo talks here after the siege.

“At this stage, we have not reached an agreement on any of the subjects,” Israel’s chief negotiator, Maj. Gen. Amnon Shahak, told Israel Radio in an afternoon interview.

At the top of the list are PLO demands for an armed international observer force and a contingent of Palestinian police in Hebron, where more than 120,000 Arabs have been under military curfew for almost a month to protect 415 Jewish settlers from retaliation.