2 Israelis Die in Drive-By Shooting : Mideast: A third settler is critically hurt in Hebron attack that extremists say was motivated by revenge. Jews kill a Palestinian near West Bank city of Nablus.

Palestinian extremists raked a Jewish settler’s car with gunfire Tuesday, killing an Israeli man and woman and critically injuring the woman’s 21-year-old daughter in the embattled West Bank town of Hebron.

The drive-by shooting rekindled the national debate over the future of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

The killings, part of a renewed cycle of violence between Jewish and Palestinian extremists in the territories, also deepened the anger and fear in nearby settlements such as Kiryat Arba. It was the home of one of Tuesday’s victims, who was one of the more than 110,000 Jewish settlers living throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Within hours of the slayings--which the Palestinian Islamic extremist group Hamas told two Israeli radio stations were in revenge for an attack by Kiryat Arba settlers that wounded 18 Palestinians on Monday--armed Israelis fatally shot a Palestinian man near the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

The Israeli army reported that the Israelis, who were being stoned by Palestinians along the roadside, opened fire on the Palestinian when he tried to snatch a weapon from their passing truck.

Reacting to the latest violence, which came on the eve of today’s scheduled ceremony marking the official liberation of Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and several Cabinet ministers suggested that settlers had provoked Tuesday’s slayings by firing at Palestinian youths stoning them in Hebron the previous day.

Rabin called Monday’s shootings by about two dozen Jewish settlers, who were attacked with cinder blocks, stones and bottles while returning to Kiryat Arba from prayers in a Hebron graveyard, a “provocation.”

“In my opinion, the settlers opened fire unjustifiably,” he said.

Early Tuesday, Israeli police arrested and jailed at least two of the young Jewish settlers involved in the Monday shooting, in which witnesses said Israeli soldiers also fired dozens of rounds into the crowd of Palestinians.

As the settlers denounced the arrests and fumed over Tuesday’s killings, Rabin’s Cabinet bolstered the government view that the settlers had brought the attack upon themselves.

Immigration Minister Yair Tsaban, a consistent advocate of removing Jewish settlements from the heart of Hebron, questioned the legitimacy of the prayer service that brought the settlers into town the day before. Monday was a Jewish holiday that some Kiryat Arba residents mark by visiting a tomb in Hebron’s ancient Jewish cemetery.

“If we allow an artificial cult of ancient graves (to develop), we are likely to find ourselves with many new graves in Israel, and we have to prevent that,” Tsaban said.

Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, the Israeli chief of staff, found himself on the defensive with most of Rabin’s Cabinet, indicating that he expected attacks like the Tuesday killings to continue in the West Bank and the 13 Jewish settlements that the Palestine Liberation Organization agreed will remain in Gaza even after its liberation from occupation this week. “This struggle will continue,” he said. “It’s true that this situation isn’t simple, and the security isn’t absolute.”

But for many of Kiryat Arba’s embattled residents, security was virtually nonexistent.

As the settlers prepared to bury yet another victim on Tuesday--Rafael Yairi, 36, who recently immigrated here from the Netherlands--most Kiryat Arba residents declined to comment on the killings. They angrily said they felt that the world, the media and even their own government are against them.

But those who did agree to speak said the slayings underscored the daily danger and isolation that had become routine for them even before the Israeli-PLO agreement for limited Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho. The agreement, signed on the White House lawn in September, triggered a violent backlash from extremist groups that oppose it from both sides of the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict.

In Tuesday’s incident, Yairi was killed in the passenger seat of the car as he accompanied 48-year-old Margalit Ruth Shohat and her daughter, Yael, from a holiday celebration in the Gaza settlement of Gush Qatif. Neighbors said Yairi did not want the two women traveling alone through the territories; he sent his wife and two daughters home by bus. Shohat, who was killed, and Yael, who was in critical condition with a bullet in her head, lived in another settlement north of Jerusalem.

Violence “is getting to be routine for us,” said Pini Beno, 22, who was born and raised in Kiryat Arba. “I just want everything to be quiet. . . . Now, I’m always afraid.”