Troops Mistakenly Kill 2 Israeli Security Guards in West Bank

Edgy Israeli soldiers combing the West Bank countryside for Palestinian militants Thursday mistakenly killed two armed Israeli security guards who had been standing watch over a mobile telephone antenna on a remote hillside.

One of the victims, Yehuda Ben Yosef, had just gotten out of the Israeli army Sunday. The other, Yoav Doron, was an army officer who did security work on the side. The men, both in their early 20s, were dead before ambulances arrived.

Army officials, declaring the incident a tragedy that would be thoroughly investigated, said soldiers shouted orders to halt and then opened fire after running across the men and a station wagon on the edge of a muddy road. As bullets pummeled the car, which had the word “security” written on it in Hebrew in red lettering, one of the victims turned and fled. Fire from an Israeli helicopter hovering overhead mowed him down.”We started shouting and calling for help. They sent us an ambulance, but it was too late,” an unidentified witness told Israel Radio. “What did the army say? That it was a mistake. After that, ambulances came, the army came, who didn’t come? They took the bodies and left.”

The deaths were the latest sign that the lands around the city of Hebron are on a hair trigger. Home to the sacred tomb believed to contain the bones of the biblical patriarchs, the ancient city is much desired -- and seldom placid. Palestinians reluctantly share the old city with a beleaguered minority of notoriously hard-line Jewish settlers and the Israeli soldiers who guard them. The Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad are strong in the streets.

In a fresh round of bloodshed, scores of people have been killed in Hebron in recent months, including two settlers slain in the outpost of Kiryat Arba on March 7. Hebron was also home to Mahmoud Hamdan Kawasme, a 20-year-old student who climbed onto a bus in Haifa last week and blew himself up. The death toll from that attack climbed to 18 this week, when Moran Shoshan, 20, died of her injuries.

Israeli intelligence had warned that militants were likely to strike at Jews near Hebron on Thursday, and in anticipation the hills were thick with patrols. It was soldiers at the edge of the nearby Pnei Haver settlement who caught sight of the security guards.

Witnesses said soldiers fired a missile from an Apache helicopter; an army spokeswoman said they used light machine guns.

“This was an operational lapse with tragic, painful results,” said Moshe Kaplinsky, chief of the central command. “We will investigate the incident down to the last detail.”

When the commander of the Hebron division went to Ben Yosef’s house to pay condolences, his father called for his resignation. “We do not forgive him,” the father told television reporters.

Throughout these lands, spirits are sour. Israelis are in despair over the bombings and sniper attacks of the 29-month-old Palestinian uprising; Palestinians are weary from months of curfews and roadblocks, deadly raids and rampant arrests by Israel as well as its reoccupation in the West Bank. Five Palestinians were killed Thursday night in the West Bank village of Tamoun. The army said they were militants en route to attack Jews. One of them wore an explosives belt, an army spokeswoman said, and another carried a backpack with a bomb inside.

Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, a Jewish man and his son were sitting in their car when a gunman shot the boy in the stomach and his father in the arm, then disappeared into the stone alleyways that wind toward the Old City. Police said the shootings were probably a terrorist attack.