Ending Lull, New Mideast Violence Kills 10

An explosion of violence between Israelis and Palestinians on roads, outside mosques and in towns and cities Friday left at least 10 people dead, ending a brief lull in 10 weeks of deadly fighting.

Five Palestinians, four of them reportedly policemen, were killed by Israeli tank shells outside the northern West Bank town of Janin. An Israeli mother of six and the man driving her to work were gunned down in a drive-by shooting near a Jewish settlement in the southern West Bank. Another Israeli was shot dead as he rode a bus near the Jordan Valley town of Jericho.

In Jerusalem’s Old City, a massive police presence failed to prevent clashes as more than 100,000 Muslims ended noon Ramadan prayers and streamed out of the Al Aqsa mosque compound. A teenage Palestinian was shot dead in fighting that raged until night fell. In Bethlehem, a Palestinian man was shot dead by Israeli troops, and a 13-year-old was said to be brain dead in a Hebron hospital after troops shot him in the head.

It was the sort of day that made talk of a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations any time soon seem farfetched at best. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak spoke of the need for Israelis to stand firm and hinted at further retaliation for the attacks on Jewish settlers that have become an almost daily occurrence.

“The cowardly attack on civilians will not break our spirit and our determined struggle against violence and terrorism,” Barak’s office quoted him as saying. “As we have proved in the past, heinous murderers will not escape without punishment.”

The army announced Friday night that it was imposing closures on each Palestinian city in the West Bank, just days after Israeli officials had spoken of easing restrictions on Palestinians during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The upsurge in violence came just days before a fact-finding committee headed by former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell is due to arrive to begin its investigation into the causes of the violence, something Palestinians have demanded as a precondition to resuming peace negotiations.

Palestinians on Friday spoke of the Israelis going berserk, but Jewish settlers spoke of their government abandoning them. The rioting, gun battles, shellings and drive-by shootings pushed the death toll to more than 300 since the turmoil began in late September. Thousands have been wounded in the violence that has buried hopes for peace and provoked a government crisis in Israel.

“Every day it is another funeral, another round of condolence calls. We are sitting ducks,” said Yehudit Tayyar, a spokeswoman for the Yesha Council, an umbrella group of West Bank and Gaza Strip settlers.

Enraged settlers blocked West Bank roads and stoned Palestinian cars after Rina Didovski, 39, was killed and Eliahu Ben Ami, 41, was mortally wounded in the drive-by shooting outside the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, where Didovski was a teacher. It was the second such shooting in two days. In the first, three Israelis were wounded, one of them critically.

Later, settlers exchanged blows with left-wing Israelis outside Barak’s Jerusalem home, which Didovski’s funeral cortege passed en route to her burial.

Palestinian activists who had called for a “day of rage” Friday got what they asked for. Today is to be another “day of rage,” and tensions are bound to be high as Palestinians bury their dead. The two days of demonstrations were called to mark the 13th anniversary of the outbreak of the first intifada, or uprising, against Israeli military rule of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

That intifada led to the 1993 signing of the Oslo peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, seven years of on-again, off-again peace negotiations, and Israel’s partial withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.

What Palestinians call the Al Aqsa intifada erupted in September after Ariel Sharon, leader of the right-wing Likud Party, outraged Muslims by touring the Temple Mount compound that houses the Al Aqsa mosque. The site is holy to Jews and Muslims, and both Israel and the Palestinians claim sovereignty over it.

As has often been the case in the weeks of bloody confrontations, Israeli and Palestinian versions of Friday’s events differed sharply. Zuhair Manasra, the governor of Janin, told the Reuters news agency that the army fired three missiles at a police position after demonstrators threw stones at soldiers. A civilian who happened to be passing by was killed along with the policemen, Manasra said.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said that a tank fired shells in the direction of what she said were “four armed figures in an area that the interim peace agreements say people are not allowed to be armed in, a place where a lot of Palestinians had fired on us.” The men, the spokeswoman said, “were not wearing uniforms.”

The biggest demonstrations erupted in Jerusalem’s Old City after noon prayers. Several hundred Palestinian youths pelted police with rocks shortly after the prayers ended, near Lion’s Gate and on the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows, which Jesus is said to have traversed on the way to his crucifixion. Demonstrators attacked a police station at Lion’s Gate that they had burned and trashed at the start of the revolt. They built a barricade on the Via Dolorosa and threw stones and Molotov cocktails at police.

Police responded with rubber-coated and rubber bullets, stun grenades, tear gas and live ammunition. Samir Ammar Mashni, 16, was shot in the head by a live bullet and killed, and his blood stained the stones where he fell. Dozens of Palestinians and police were injured.

Even as the clashes raged at one end of the ancient city that is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, thousands of Palestinians did their Friday grocery shopping a few minutes’ walk away at Damascus Gate. As half a dozen ambulances ferrying the wounded to hospitals screamed by, they carried bags of bread and cakes home to break the daily fast that Muslims observe throughout Ramadan.