Violence Spreads to Israel’s Northern Border

As diplomatic efforts intensified Sunday to stop the violence raging between Israelis and Palestinians, tension mounted on the border with Lebanon, with Israeli warplanes bombing the area after the Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah killed a soldier and injured two others in a roadside attack.

In the West Bank, Israeli soldiers killed four armed Palestinians as they set out from the town of Kalqilya into an area under Israeli control, an Israeli army spokesman said. The Palestinians had opened fire a short time earlier on an Israeli car driving to a nearby Jewish settlement, the spokesman said.

In Jerusalem, Israeli officials confirmed that Prime Minister Ehud Barak sent two senior envoys to meet secretly Saturday night with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat in the Gaza Strip and said that such high-level contacts would continue. Barak also sent his senior security advisor, Danny Yatom, to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. Mubarak has often served as a mediator between Barak and Arafat.

The Israelis continue to insist that the violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip must dramatically diminish before real peace negotiations can resume. But clashes in the territories, which have become a daily ritual since Sept. 28, continued.

Shortly after nightfall, shots were fired from Palestinian-controlled territory in the West Bank at the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo, just south of Jerusalem, built on land captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War. Israeli troops responded with heavy machine-gun fire at the Palestinian village of Beit Jala.

Israeli military intelligence warned that an upsurge in the violence that already has claimed more than 250 lives, most of them Arab, could be expected during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins today. Israeli officials have said that if violent demonstrations and attacks on soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip subside, Israel will lift its closure of those territories. Muslims traditionally come to Jerusalem to pray at Al Aqsa mosque in the Old City during Ramadan, a time of fasting and prayer.

But Israel’s attention Sunday was riveted on the north, where the attack against an Israeli patrol near Har Dov, a disputed area on the Lebanese border, deepened concern here that the conflict with the Palestinians may yet spill over to neighboring Arab states. Three soldiers were clearing a road a mile south of the border when a roadside bomb went off, instantly killing one of them. Israel is investigating how Hezbollah managed to infiltrate its territory.

Hezbollah issued a statement in Beirut claiming responsibility for the attack in the Shabaa Farms area, where the borders of Israel, Lebanon and Syria meet, and televised on its station footage of the roadside bombing. Hezbollah says the Shabaa Farms area is in Lebanon, a claim rejected by Israel and the United Nations, which verified months ago that Israel had fully withdrawn from Lebanon. Israel says the Shabaa Farms area is on Syrian territory it captured during the 1967 war.

In its statement, Hezbollah said that it was performing its “duty to complete the liberation of the occupied territory.” Israel has blamed Syria and Iran for Hezbollah’s attacks on its forces and promised massive retaliation. But on Sunday it responded to the bombing with limited airstrikes against and artillery shelling of suspected Hezbollah hide-outs in the hills near the village of Kfar Chouba, about a mile from the Shabaa Farms area, inside Lebanon. The Lebanese reported that one person was injured, a man believed to be a Syrian construction worker who was hit by flying debris.

“There is no doubt that the north too is in a very delicate situation,” Barak said. “Violence could erupt there at any moment.” Israel, he said, “will go on acting with force and wisdom by the Israeli army in order to respond to everything, to respond with force on the spot but not to be drawn into adventures.” Israeli military intelligence has warned repeatedly in recent weeks that Hezbollah has moved men and arms close to the border in an effort to provoke Israel into a harsh retaliation that might, in turn, provoke a response from Syria.

Mindful that the fight with the Palestinians may still pull the region into war, Barak, whose minority government is barely clinging to power, reportedly is willing to consider Arafat’s demand for the introduction of some sort of international force in the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel Television quoted sources close to the prime minister Sunday night who said that Barak is considering the expansion of the observer force that has operated in Hebron since a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, massacred about 30 Palestinians in 1994 in the Cave of the Patriarchs, sacred to Muslims and Jews. The 85 observers from six nations patrol the streets where several hundred Jewish settlers live under the Israeli army’s heavy guard in the heart of the Palestinian West Bank town. The unarmed observers videotape incidents and issue reports to both Israel and the Palestinians.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Sunday that the Hebron force “does a good job” but that Palestinians would like to see an international force “with more teeth” introduced to “protect Palestinians” from Israeli troops. He said Barak continues to completely reject the notion of an international protective force.

But others, primarily Russia, support the notion of an international force. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, taking advantage of the drift in U.S. peacemaking efforts since the presidential election, met with Arafat in Moscow on Friday and engineered a phone conversation between Arafat and Barak.

But Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said Sunday that Israel still regards the United States as the primary mediator between it and the Palestinians. Ben-Ami postponed a scheduled trip this week to Moscow. U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis B. Ross is expected here sometime this week to again explore ways to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.