BRUSSELS: EU lawmakers told Israel’s foreign minister yesterday that her country will have to do more to stop the expansion of West Bank settlements.

Lawmakers at the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee said the Jewish occupiers’ moves there were threatening Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in Brussels to seek closer EU ties, said it was no longer official Israeli policy to expand settlements in the West Bank and the government had been trying to reduce them since peace talks restarted last year.

“We are not trying to use or abuse the period of time in which we negotiate in order to have more land, or to get more land from the Palestinians,” Livni told the committee.

She said “minor” efforts by some occupiers around the West Bank town of Hebron to expand their settlements would not derail peace talks or efforts to set up a Palestinian state.

As she spoke dozens of radical Jewish occupiers rioted in Hebron. They threw stones at Palestinians and at Israeli police and soldiers, spray-painted slogans and damaged Palestinian graves.

Palestinians also retaliated, seriously injuring an Israeli teenager who was hit in the head by a stone.

Dozens more were lightly injured, with Palestinians reporting at least 36 wounded and occupiers some 18.

An Israeli police spokesman said two Israelis were arrested.

The rioting erupted after some 1,500 occupiers arrived in Hebron late Monday amid rumors that the Israeli authorities were about to forcibly evacuate a disputed house occupied by Israelis.

Israel’s Supreme Court on Nov. 16 ordered the Israeli government to evacuate the house. Since then hundreds of hard-line and radical Israelis have arrived at the house as “reinforcements,” vowing to prevent the evacuation.

The Jews occupied the house in early 2007, saying they were the tenants of an American Jew who purchased it and that they have documents proving it. Its Palestinian owner denies this.

The Israel Air Force, meanwhile, launched an airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip in the afternoon, killing two fighters and injuring at least two others.

An Israeli Army spokesman said the airstrike was launched at a group of fighters who had just fired a mortar shell toward Israel’s border crossing with the southern Gaza Strip of Kerem Shalom.

The armed wing of the Hamas movement that rules Gaza said its fighters fired six such mortar shells at the crossing since the morning.

Israel has imposed a near-total closure of the Gaza Strip for 27 days now in response to renewed rocket and mortar fire from the strip.

The new cycle of violence has all but shattered a five-month-old cease-fire brokered by Egypt. The truce is to expire Dec. 19.