Slayings Overshadow Mideast Talks

Ambushes, grenade battles and suicide bombings claimed at least six lives Tuesday and drowned out fledgling U.S. efforts to push Israelis and Palestinians toward a meaningful cease-fire.

Palestinian gunmen killed two Jewish settlers who were on their way to the funeral of a third settler killed earlier in the day. The gunmen overtook the women’s van on a road several miles south of Jerusalem and opened fire. One of the dead was an American.

Four other occupants of the van were wounded. The shooters fled to nearby Bethlehem, a West Bank city under Palestinian rule.

Later, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in a failed attempt to wipe out Israeli soldiers guarding a fortified post in the Gaza Strip. One soldier was wounded, and others opened fire and killed the bomber’s companion as he hurled grenades at the post.

A third Palestinian was killed in a shooting at an Israeli army checkpoint near the West Bank city of Jericho. And a large bomb exploded on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, tying up traffic for hours but injuring no one in the first such attack on the country’s central east-west axis.

The violence overshadowed the continued shuttle diplomacy of U.S. special envoy William Burns, the Bush administration’s new point man on the Middle East, and it increased pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to retaliate.

Israelis and Palestinians held their first security meeting in weeks Tuesday, but no progress was reported. The top official from each side canceled his appearance at the last minute.

Adding fuel to the fire, Israel’s housing minister announced that plans to build 700 homes at Jewish settlements will proceed, despite mounting international pressure to freeze the expansions.

And in another development, Palestinian militants briefly kidnapped an American journalist and a British photographer as a warning that U.S. and British citizens will be punished for their governments’ support of the Jewish state.

Sharon declared a unilateral cease-fire a week ago in response to recommendations issued by an international commission chaired by former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Maine). The Palestinians maintain that the cease-fire is a publicity gimmick; Israelis note that Palestinian violence has only increased since Sharon’s announcement. Each new Israeli death puts additional pressure on the prime minister to respond with force.

“I think we show great restraint, and we are going to show that as long as I have hopes that [Palestinian Authority President Yasser] Arafat will announce a cease-fire,” Sharon said in a satellite news conference on CNN.

A key recommendation of the Mitchell commission is a freeze on settlements, but Sharon has said he won’t even discuss such a measure--opposed by his right-wing constituency--until there is a halt in the violence. Construction and Housing Minister Natan Sharansky said Tuesday that he had approved bids for building new homes in two settlements.

Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told reporters that Arafat presented Burns, the U.S. envoy, with a map of 18 new Jewish settlements erected since Sharon took office in March. His statement followed a report last week by the Israeli organization Peace Now, which opposes settlements, that 15 illegal outposts had been built.

Arafat, in Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, called for urgent international action to stop the bloodshed in the Middle East.

“We think urgent international actions are needed to stop the dangerous spiral of violence, the economic blockade and the shortages of food and medicine from which our people are suffering,” Arafat said after meeting Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov.

Ivanov said Moscow and Washington have a united approach to the Middle East situation. “We are definitely speaking in one voice as we believe that Washington is also interested in stopping the spiral of tension and normalizing the situation in the region,” he said.

The settlers who were ambushed south of Jerusalem were en route to a funeral for Gilead Zar, the security chief for a string of settlements in the north-central West Bank. Zar had been seriously wounded by Palestinian gunmen two months ago but recovered and was back at work when ambushed. His attackers opened fire on his vehicle, then moved in and shot him at close range before fleeing toward the Palestinian city of Nablus, the army said.

Brig. Gen. Benny Gantz, the commander of Israeli armed forces in the West Bank, said it was not clear whether the attackers knew it was Zar in the vehicle.

A large number of settlers turned out for the security chief’s funeral, which began with a march that passed Sharon’s official residence in Jerusalem. “Cancer! Cancer! Because of you, people are being killed!” some marchers shouted.

“Enough is enough,” right-wing legislator Benny Elon said. “This is war, and we have to give back the answer as a war. I want to see the victory.”

Newsweek magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Joshua Hammer, and a photographer on contract, Gary Knight, were briefly kidnapped by armed Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. The two journalists were released unharmed after about five hours.

The militants identified themselves as a faction affiliated with Arafat’s Fatah movement. But Fatah and Arafat’s top security officials denounced the group’s actions, as did Newsweek editors and the Tel Aviv-based Foreign Press Assn.

The two journalists were detained when they hooked up with the gunmen for an arranged interview. The two men were kept in a room, fed and given cigarettes, Knight said.

“They were quite relaxed,” Knight told the BBC. “I asked if we could come back tomorrow, and they said we would be very welcome.”

In a statement faxed to various news organizations, however, the kidnappers said this was the first of a series of actions that would show U.S. and British citizens that they would be held responsible for their governments’ support for Israel. Americans and Britons will be “subject to kidnapping and killing” if the policies do not change, the statement said.

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Times staff writer Robyn Dixon in Moscow contributed to this report.