Israeli Teen Slain Amid Mounting Mideast Tensions

Hours before the start of the Jewish Sabbath, Palestinian gunmen fired on a group of young Israeli hitchhikers outside a West Bank settlement Friday, killing one teenager and wounding three other young people.

The ambush, the second fatal shooting of an Israeli in five days on a West Bank road, came amid sharply rising tensions over attacks by Palestinian militants.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in a meeting this week with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, demanded that the Palestinian leader crack down on militant groups and choke off their attacks against Israeli targets.

Ambushes on lonely West Bank roads left scores of Jewish settlers dead and wounded during the last 4 1/2 years. But such attacks had become a rarity in recent months, after the main militant groups agreed to a cease-fire at Abbas’ behest.

Israel expressed outrage over Friday’s shooting.

“This is another clear demonstration of how important it is that the Palestinian Authority follow through on its commitment to disarm the terrorists,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry.

Responsibility for most of the recent attacks has been claimed by the Islamic Jihad militia. But a commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an offshoot of Abbas’ Fatah faction, told journalists in the West Bank that his organization was responsible for Friday’s shooting.

The claim was not verified by senior leaders of the group, however, raising the possibility that a local Al Aqsa cell had acted on its own.

Israel has threatened to resume so-called targeted killings of militants affiliated with Islamic Jihad, though it was not clear whether it intended to take aim only at those thought to be planning imminent attacks. So far, it has not threatened to resume assassinations of members of other militant groups.

Israeli troops rounded up more than 60 suspected members of Islamic Jihad this week after the group claimed responsibility for the killing Monday of a Jewish settler in the northern West Bank.

Israel is not a party to the cease-fire Abbas extracted from militant groups early in his tenure. Sharon’s government has warned repeatedly that it will respond with extreme force if militants stage attacks during the planned withdrawal of settlers and troops from the Gaza Strip this summer.

The militant groups accuse Israel of disrupting what had been relative calm by conducting raids in Palestinian areas.

About three times as many Palestinians as Israelis have died since Israel and the Palestinian Authority declared a cessation of hostilities at a February summit in Egypt.

The Israeli army said that in Friday’s attack, several assailants with Kalashnikov assault rifles approached a popular hitchhiking post in the late afternoon outside the settlement of Beit Haggai, southwest of the West Bank town of Hebron.

A group of young Israelis was getting into a car that had stopped for them when the shooting erupted, an army spokeswoman said. There were no immediate details on the teen who was slain.

Earlier in the day, another Israeli motorist was slightly wounded in a shooting near the West Bank town of Tulkarm.

Israel’s initial political response was muted because of the Sabbath, which runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. But Sharon is said to have been so infuriated by recent attacks that he spent much of his meeting with Abbas delivering an angry lecture on the need to restrain the militant groups.

The Palestinian leader, meanwhile, was struggling to cope with spiraling lawlessness in the West Bank. Palestinian security forces carried on running gun battles during the day with militants in the town of Jenin.

In the West Bank and Gaza, defiant supporters of Islamic Jihad staged protests of Israel’s decision to target members of the group’s military wing for arrest or assassination. But mindful of Israel’s ability to stage pinpoint missile strikes, the group’s senior leaders stayed away from the rallies.

Islamic Jihad’s chief spokesman in the Gaza Strip, Khalid Batch, watched a rally in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya from several hundred yards away, participants and witnesses said.

*

Special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Gaza City contributed to this report.