9 More Die as Fighting in Mideast Intensifies

An especially nasty day and night of fighting left eight Palestinians and one Israeli soldier dead Saturday as people here resigned themselves to a bleak future of protracted guerrilla warfare.

Saturday exacted the deadliest 24-hour toll in days.

In Ramallah, a Palestinian-controlled city surrounded and sealed off by Israeli forces, two men were killed late Saturday by Israeli soldiers firing antitank missiles and tank cannons, according to Palestinian and Israeli sources.

The men were identified as members of the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and may have been part of a militia firing on the nearby Jewish settlement of Psagot, according to Ramallah-area residents.

An Israeli army statement said its troops opened fire on a “terrorist cell” operating in a high-rise building in the residential Al Bireh area of Ramallah. Israel has emphasized that it will shoot to kill at any source of fire “endangering the lives of [Israeli] civilians and soldiers.” Several Palestinian civilian passersby have also been killed in such reprisals.

Clashes that have claimed more than 200 lives in six weeks have evolved steadily from stone-throwing demonstrations that begin in the afternoon to all-out gun battles that punctuate the night near key Palestinian cities and Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Earlier Saturday, gun battles raged for hours between Palestinians and Israeli troops near the Gush Katif Jewish settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip. Two Palestinian men, identified as customs police who were also university students, roared up to an army post in a small civilian car and, according to the Israeli army, opened fire.

Israeli forces immediately blasted the car and its occupants. Crowds that had gathered grew enraged when the Israelis would not release the bodies until they had first been inspected. The Israelis, fearing a booby trap on the vehicle, dispatched a remote-controlled robot to retrieve the bodies from the damaged car.

A 22-year-old Israeli soldier, also killed in the exchange, was the second to die in two days.

Israeli troops are increasingly under attack from ambushes and remote-controlled roadside bombs, in what many here are calling the Lebanonization of Israel’s war with the Palestinians. Israel was ultimately forced to withdraw from southern Lebanon in May after the Israeli public refused to absorb more casualties in order to continue occupying part of another country, and after military and civilian leaders came to see the occupation as untenable.

Palestinian and Israeli forces also traded gunfire Saturday in Jericho, Nablus, Tulkarm and in Gaza, including at a demonstration site near the Erez crossing point into Israel, where another Palestinian youth was killed. Still another was killed in Hebron.

Meanwhile, at a clash in Bethlehem near the Jewish shrine Rachel’s Tomb, a freelance photographer on assignment for Associated Press was hit in the abdomen by a bullet. Yola Monakhov, 26, who holds dual American-Russian citizenship, was reported in serious condition, but her injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.

Palestinians who had been near her told reporters that an Israeli soldier shot her as she bent down to take a picture. The army said it does not target journalists.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had been scheduled to have a meeting with President Clinton in Washington today that seemed likely to be largely symbolic, given Clinton’s lame-duck status and Barak’s own political weakness. The meeting was postponed when Barak returned to Israel to deal with a hijacking. Polls published Friday continued to show Barak losing an election now by a wide margin if he were opposed by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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PLANE HIJACKED TO ISRAEL

Two men said to be pro-Palestinian Chechens hijacked a Russian airliner to Israel. A20