2 Israelis Die, 5 Hurt in West Bank Attack

Gunmen opened fire on an Israeli family traveling near this Arab village at twilight Wednesday, killing a woman and a 12-year-old boy and injuring five others.

The victims, members of the same family, were residents of the nearby Jewish settlement of Beit El, settlement and security officials said. Three children were among the injured.

Israeli army officials said the assailants fired from a car bearing blue license plates--which are issued to West Bank Palestinians--and fled toward the Palestinian-controlled city of Ramallah, about 15 miles north of Jerusalem.

The army immediately placed a curfew on Ramallah.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cut short a family vacation and returned to Jerusalem after the incident. He condemned what he described as a “despicable act of murder.”

In a statement, Netanyahu also warned Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority not to “offer shelter to terrorists and murderers of children.”

There was no immediate response from Arafat or members of his government.

Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordecai blamed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical Palestinian faction, for the attack. He did not elaborate.

Late Wednesday, Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, the top Israeli officer in the West Bank, said Palestinian authorities had discovered at a Ramallah garbage dump a burning car that fit the description of the one involved in the shooting. Dayan said Israeli troops, in coordination with Palestinian security forces, had entered the city to investigate.

The shooting, similar to several carried out in recent years by militant Palestinian groups, was expected to heighten an already-tense atmosphere between Israelis and Palestinians over plans for settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and a long-stalled Israeli troop withdrawal from the majority-Arab city of Hebron.

Despite two months of talks, the two sides have yet to agree on the timing and terms of the Hebron pullout.

About two hours after the shooting, the victims’ deep blue Volkswagen station wagon still sat, its turn signal blinking, at a stop sign that marks the convergence of narrow roads leading to Ramallah, Beit El and Surda. Two bullets had shattered the windshield, others had riddled the driver’s side of the car.

Pinhas Wallerstein, a settler leader who heads the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, was among those who heard the news and raced to the isolated shooting site on a newly constructed bypass road that runs between Jewish settlements.

Wallerstein said the incident underlined the tensions affecting the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.

Three years after the two sides signed an interim peace agreement, he said, “of course, it’s not peace. To murder a child, a 12-year-old, it’s not peace. It’s easy to kill civilian life.”

Bentsi Sagiv, 34, security coordinator for the nearby settlement of Dolev, said he drove up to the junction, probably minutes after the shooting, and discovered the dead and wounded.

The father of the family already had left to seek help, apparently running along the road toward Beit El, Sagiv said.

“A woman got out of the car and said they’d been shot,” he said.

Benny Elon, a Beit El resident and member of the Israeli parliament from the far-right Moledet Party, blamed the Palestinian leader for the attack, saying: “I have no doubt it is Arafat who is behind this. If he wants to prove that he isn’t, let him produce the murderers. Any time the political negotiations get stuck, he backs them up with terror.”

Palestinians condemned the shooting but said it was an inevitable result of the frustration many feel over the stalled peace process.