Ax-Wielding Arab Killed in Israel as Violence Persists : Mideast: Man, 18, apparently bent on avenging mosque massacre is shot by soldiers he tried to attack.

A young Palestinian from the Gaza Strip was shot dead Saturday when he tried to attack a group of Israeli soldiers with an ax, deepening the bitterness of a violent week as negotiators prepared to resume talks on Palestinian self-rule.

In Jerusalem, Israeli border guards were deployed around an East Jerusalem hotel, blocking a scheduled conference on the 30th anniversary of the Palestine Liberation Organization and sending participants marching through the streets with American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson to an alternate site.

Israel, still frustrated by PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s failure to personally condemn two terrorist attacks last week that killed eight Israelis, announced new determination to impose an economic seal on the occupied Palestinian territories. Since Thursday, travel restrictions have prevented up to 70,000 Palestinians from going to their jobs in Israel.

Agriculture Minister Yaacov Tsur said the Israeli Cabinet will meet today to set recruitment figures for foreign workers to replace Palestinian laborers in Israel. “The most important thing is organizing for a longer term of closure,” Tsur said, “recognizing that the main goal is to return the sense of security to residents of Israel and to create a situation in which workers from the territories will not enter.”

PLO officials, furious at the closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, said Israel is transforming Palestinian lives into “a true hell.” They said the peace talks, scheduled to resume today in Cairo, have little chance of producing an agreement by the Wednesday deadline envisioned under the Declaration of Principles signed by Israel and the PLO last September.

“The deal is dying, and the diplomatic process is reaching a total impasse,” Yasser Abed-Rabbo, head of the PLO information department, told reporters in Tunis, Tunisia. “Even if the talks resume tomorrow, there will not be results before April 13, nor the month’s end.”

Saturday afternoon’s attempted ax attack took place at the northernmost crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian sources identified the attacker as Atef Abed, 18. They said that the ax was engraved with Hamas and that he was carrying a Koran and leaflets of the Muslim extremist group.

It was the third attack in a week mounted in apparent retaliation for the Feb. 25 massacre of about 30 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque. On Wednesday, a suicide car bomb attack against a crowded bus in the northern Israel town of Afula killed seven Israelis. A day later, one Israeli was killed in a drive-by shooting in the port city of Ashdod.

Jackson traveled to Afula on Saturday to visit victims of the bombing. Earlier, in Jerusalem, Jackson and a number of Palestinian leaders were blocked from holding an academic conference at the hotel where the PLO was founded in 1964.

Defying a government order prohibiting them from holding the conference in Jerusalem or Hebron, participants marched to the Orient House, a nearby headquarters of the Palestinians, where the conference was allowed to proceed.

“Thirty years ago, a conference met here to liberate Palestine and destroy Israel. And today we are saying coexistence and peace. I think it would mean more to say this today in the same place,” conference organizer Nabil abu Zneid said before leaving the Ambassador Hotel.

Jackson, who was scheduled to give the conference’s keynote address, compared Saturday’s events to the attempt by black students in 1954 to enter Little Rock High School in Arkansas. President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed troops to back the students up, he said.

“At this point, the opposite is happening,” Jackson said. “The troops are here not to stop those who would sabotage the peace process but to stop those who would implement the peace process.” Jackson said he would make a personal appeal to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who was to be host of a dinner for him Saturday night.

“This is why the U.S. must play a very aggressive role in this area,” Jackson said. “The Israelis and Palestinians are still like two very strong people who have a death grip on each other, and each is afraid to turn the other loose. The U.S. must push them apart and offer both of them what neither can offer the other: mutual security and a plan for institutional growth.”