HEBRON, West Bank, 20 July — Three Palestinians were killed and four others wounded late yesterday by Israeli settler shooting near Hebron in the West Bank. The victims — Muhammad Saleimeh Tmezi, Muhammad Hilmi Tmezi and 3-month-old Diya Maruan Tmezi — were in a car driving about 12 km (eight miles) to the west of Hebron when they came under fire some 500 meters from an Israeli Army roadblock. They were returning from a wedding, Palestinian sources said.
Israeli public radio said that a vigilante “committee for road security” formed by extremist settlers had claimed the attack in a statement. “Shots were fired from a car at Palestinians on highway 35,” said an Israeli police spokesman in the West Bank. He said police had opened an investigation.
Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority held Israel “entirely responsible” for the attack.
The killings came as foreign ministers of the Group of Eight industrialized nations called on Israel and the Palestinians to let outside monitors oversee a truce. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon swiftly rejected any such deployment, describing it as “a step (Israel) doesn’t want”. Palestinians have appealed for international protection against the Israeli Army’s disproportionate response to the uprising for independence they began nearly 10 months ago.
“We believe that in these circumstances, third-party monitoring, accepted by both parties, would serve their interests in implementing the Mitchell report,” the ministers said in a separate statement from their final communiqué in Rome.
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, in a telephone conversation with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said observers would contribute nothing toward stemming the bloodshed.
In the Gaza Strip, Arafat urged the G8 leaders to intervene to stop the violence. “The situation in the Middle East is in danger of triggering a wide regional explosion and not only between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Arafat’s spokesman quoted him as saying.
The deployment of international monitors must be accepted by both the Israelis and the Palestinians if the plan is to succeed, the US State Department insisted. “We fully endorse the G-8 foreign minister’s statement, which notes that we believe that third-party monitoring accepted by both parties would serve their interests in implementing the Mitchell report,” said State Department spokesman Philip Reeker.
Arafat’s top aide Nabil Abu Rudeina welcomed the G-8 move, but said the group should set up a mechanism to force the Sharon government to accept the initiative.
In Cairo, visiting British envoy Ben Bradshaw suggested international monitors could start work after an initial “24-hour period of quiet” as a way of making a Palestinian-Israeli truce stick. Bradshaw, a Foreign Office minister, said: “We’re ... very hopeful of moving forward on the question of monitors.”
Meanwhile, Muslim scholars cautioned yesterday that a plan by rabbis to organize visits by Jews to Jerusalem’s Al-Haram Al-Sharif would escalate tensions at the sensitive holy place. Rabbis from Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza have urged Jews to tour the site, where the Palestinian uprising erupted in September after a visit by Sharon. They made the call despite a ritual Jewish ban on visits by Jews to the site.
