Anger Pervades W. Bank After Arab Boy’s Death

The Middle East peace process continued to fray Tuesday as Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youths clashed after the funeral of an 11-year-old Arab boy allegedly beaten to death by a Jewish settler.

Several thousand mourners marched in the funeral procession of Hilmi Shoushain this hillside village near Bethlehem, bearing black flags and placards calling for the “Nazis” and “criminal settlers” to get out of the predominantly Palestinian West Bank.

About 50 masked youths peeled off at the end of the march to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, who then used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the crowd. No major injuries were reported.

As the village simmered under a cold rain and hours-long army curfew, settlers from throughout the West Bank and their supporters converged on downtown Jerusalem to press the government not to redeploy Israeli troops from the city of Hebron and to protest U.S. efforts to broker a pullback.

“Clinton, leave Israel alone,” read a hand-painted banner. The demonstrators marched to the U.S. Consulate, where they gave a Marine guard a letter asserting that Hebron must remain in the hands of Jews forever.

In Hebron itself, settlers surrounded Palestinian officials touring the disputed city, shoved them, spat and shouted: “Dogs! . . . Hebron is ours.” Israeli paratroopers on patrol intervened and ushered the Palestinians to safety.

The angry events illustrated the growing tensions surrounding the more than 140 Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he will make good on the previous government’s commitment in an interim peace accord to relinquish control of most of Hebron, where about 450 Jews live in the middle of about 100,000 Palestinians. But three weeks of U.S.-mediated talks failed to produce terms satisfying to both sides.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has authorized an expansion of Jewish settlements in what Palestinians say is a violation of the spirit of the bilateral peace accords. The government has announced it will sell about 3,000 settlement apartments that were built under the previous, Labor government but were then left empty during peace negotiations.

The daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot reported Tuesday that the right-wing government also plans to build an additional 8,000 apartments northwest of Jerusalem in the settlements of Kiryat Sefer, Or Sameach and Mattityahu. Netanyahu spokesman David Bar-Illan said that while he “wished” this was true, it was unlikely. “I think it will be a long time before we build anything. That may be somebody’s projection, but not a concrete plan,” he cautioned.

But neither side seemed in a mood to hear moderate talk about anything to do with the West Bank--a land where Arabs and Jews are largely unwilling to acknowledge each other’s humanity.

Settlers demonstrating in Jerusalem referred to the boy buried in Hussan as “the rock thrower” rather than as a dead child. Mourners in Hussan, meanwhile, called for revenge and the destruction of the nearby settlement of Hadar Beitar, where the suspect held in Hilmi’s death was chief of security.

Men and women from the Shousha family gathered on carpets in separate houses to mourn the violent death of a son who doctors had just determined was the perfect match to donate bone marrow to his 1 1/2-year-old sister. Hilmi’s death, they said, most likely will mean the loss of the little girl too.

Hilmi’s cousins, Ibrahim, 12, and Tahrir, 14, recounted how a settler drove his jeep up to the three boys Sunday, got out and chased Hilmi down. The settler kicked him, stomped on his throat and hit him in the head with the butt of a pistol, the two said. Then, they went on, the man administered first aid to try to revive the bleeding boy.

The cousins denied reports that they had been throwing rocks at settlers at the time.

Police detained Nahum Korman after the incident Sunday, and a Jerusalem magistrate’s court ordered the security guard’s continued detention Tuesday for investigation on a manslaughter charge. Korman has denied killing Hilmi and has said the boy fell down and hit his head. Korman’s lawyer Avraham Gan-Zvi said on Israeli radio that his client “carried [the boy] on the jeep to the ambulance. He made sure that [the boy] would make it to the hospital. . . . And in the end they arrested him.”

Boaz Goldberg, spokesman for Israel’s Judea and Samaria Police, said an autopsy showed Hilmi died of a blow to the head, but he added, “We can’t tell if the blow is because somebody hit him or because he fell on a rock.” Asked about the witness accounts, he said, “We do not always believe what the locals say.”

Such remarks added to the climate of distrust in the West Bank, where Palestinians said they doubted anyone will be brought to trial for Hilmi’s death and where Palestinian officials blamed the post-funeral clash on soldiers.

“Their presence was insensitive, a provocation. . . . They shouldn’t have been around,” said Saleh Tamari, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

While visiting the Shousha home, Tamari promised that Palestinian leaders will push for prosecution. “We are not going to leave our people exposed to Israeli terror,” he said.