JERUSALEM, 14 August 2004 — A Palestinian militant killed a Jewish settler and wounded another before being shot dead by settlement guards in the West Bank yesterday, an Israeli military source said. The Palestinian opened fire on the settlers’ car close to the settlement of Itamar, in the northern West Bank near the Palestinian town of Nablus, killing the driver and slightly wounding the passenger. The driver was named as Shlomo Miller, 50, the security coordinator at Itamar.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the attack, naming the militant as Yussef Ahmed Hanani, 25, a lieutenant in the Palestinian preventive security police from the nearby village of Beit Furik.
After firing on the car with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, Hanani seized an M-16 automatic rifle from the dying driver before settlement guards shot and killed him after a brief chase, the military source said. The Israeli Army slapped a curfew on Beit Furik and dynamited the gunman’s two-story house, leaving 10 members of his family homeless, security sources and witnesses said.
As the army went in, troops fired on stone-throwing youths, two of whom were shot and wounded, Palestinian medical sources said. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said the attack on the settlers was to avenge the deaths of Palestinians in recent Israeli Army incursions into the Balata refugee camp at Nablus and in the Gaza Strip.
