As Observer Team Exits Hebron, Clash Flares Over March : Mideast: Israeli troops fire rubber bullets at Islamic leaders trying to pray at closed shrine. International contingent was ‘fact-finding.’

An advance team from the international force assigned to protect this embattled city and its more than 100,000 Palestinians ended its first visit Monday moments before Israeli troops clashed with Palestinian Islamic leaders.

The troops fired tear gas and rubber bullets to stop the Palestinians, who tried to pray in the Cave of the Patriarchs where a Jewish settler massacred about 30 Palestinian worshipers Feb. 25. The violence erupted downtown as the international observers were on the outskirts of Hebron, wrapping up a “fact-finding mission.”

That mission coincided with the first day in seven weeks that Israeli authorities had lifted a strict military curfew in the city’s center--a move Hebron’s new Palestinian mayor called “the gift of the new guests.”

Leaders of the advance team from Norway, Denmark and Italy had expressed optimism to a busload of journalists that the unarmed, 160-member international force will be able, in about a week, to tackle its “difficult task” of restoring normalcy to Hebron.

Then three Palestinians were injured by rubber bullets Monday and a curfew again was clamped on the area.

“I won’t feel secure even with this international force here, because, as you can see, Israel won’t listen to anybody,” shopkeeper Mohammed Rifayieh, 75, concluded as tear gas canisters exploded all around his house. It is a few hundred yards from the Cave of the Patriarchs, the shrine sacred to Jews and Muslims that has been closed to both religions since the February massacre.

The timing of the Palestinian protest march was as deliberate as the visit by the observer team. Monday’s tour marked the first time that Israel has permitted an international observer force into the occupied territories since it conquered the areas 27 years ago.

An Israeli government spokesman said the army deliberately scheduled the team’s visit to end just before the Islamic clerics had scheduled their march to begin “so the two wouldn’t get mixed up.”

The Islamic leadership that staged Monday’s march--which included protesters chanting praise for the armed fundamentalist group that has claimed responsibility for a suicide car-bombing that killed seven Israelis last week--declared their effort a victory, even though they never got close to the Cave of the Patriarchs.

“We have shown the world how savage the Israelis are because they prohibited us from entering the mosque to pray,” declared Sheik Mohammed Saeed Jamal, the head of the Higher Islamic Council, after more than a dozen cameras recorded him and several hundred marchers worshiping instead in a downtown street.

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In Jerusalem, Israeli authorities took a step Monday related to the Feb. 25 Hebron massacre by Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born physician from a Jewish settlement.

A district court imposed a three-month prison sentence on Baruch Marzel, the head of the armed Jewish extremist movement Kach, of which Goldstein was a member. The judge noted that Marzel had been convicted on charges of “violent behavior” 10 times in 14 years and ordered him to serve the term for an old offense after his current indefinite period of detention.

Marzel’s arrest--under an unlimited-detention law in the past applied almost exclusively to Palestinian extremists--was ordered along with six others after the massacre. The arrest orders were Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s attempt to neutralize threats by Jewish extremists, who oppose Israel’s effort to forge peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Meantime, the Israeli Parliament’s finance committee approved the allocation of $4.6 million to compensate massacre survivors and families of those killed in the mosque; the panel also agreed to provide $1.6 million more to finance the commission that has been investigating the massacre.

In recent days, the commission has heard from, among others, Rabin, who agreed to testify only in secret, and Goldstein’s widow, Miriam, who told the five-member panel headed by the president of the Supreme Court that she had no idea her husband was planning the massacre.

“It is still a puzzle; that’s the truth. I am continually trying to figure it out, but I still haven’t found any answer,” Miriam Goldstein said, according to a transcript released over the weekend.

In its sixth week of hearings, the commission also heard from a Muslim guard at the mosque who testified that he called out to Israeli soldiers for help at the shrine after Goldstein shoved him away and opened fire as he entered. None of the Israelis responded, he said. “They heard me but refused,” said the guard, Mohammed abu Salah.