Palestinian kills Israeli in West Bank settlement: police

By Haitham Tamimi

BAT AYIN, West Bank (Reuters) - A Palestinian with an axe and a knife killed a 13-year-old Israeli boy and wounded a seven-year-old boy in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank on Thursday, two days after a right-wing government took power.

"The Palestinian attacker used an axe and a knife," a police officer said. "We are searching for him."

Citing Israeli "crimes of occupation," Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility in a statement.

"If this is a message to the new government, I think the Palestinians should understand the message we give in response will be much more severe," said Israeli legislator David Rotem of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, the second biggest group in the new coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Netanyahu, called the incident a "senseless act of brutality against innocents."

"The new Israeli government has a zero-tolerance policy toward these sorts of attacks and refuses to accept them as routine... The Palestinian government must, too, have a zero-tolerance policy toward terror, both in word and in deed, to demonstrate its commitment to peace," he added

Police and the Magen David Adom ambulance service said the two boys were residents of Bat Ayin. The attacker was confronted by an adult, who wrestled away his weapons, they added.

The attacker then fled.

"He tried to stab me. I kicked him, he kicked me," the man, who gave his name only as Avinoam, told Israel's Channel 10 television.

Some 1,000 Israelis live in Bat Ayin, near the Palestinian towns of Hebron and Bethlehem. In 2002, three settlers from Bat Ayin were sentenced by an Israeli court to prison terms ranging from 12 to 15 years for trying to set off a bomb near a Palestinian girls' school in Arab East Jerusalem.

RESTRICTIONS

Gideon Ezra, a legislator from the centrist opposition Kadima party, warned the new Israeli government against taking action against the Palestinian public or the Western-backed Palestinian Authority after the attack.

"I fear that harsh steps would only bring Palestinian moderates closer to the extremists," Ezra told reporters.

Rotem, who visited Bat Ayin after the attack, raised the prospect of tightening already stringent Israeli travel restrictions on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

The party is led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who angered Palestinians and raised the prospect of tension with Washington Wednesday by saying that Israel was not bound by a deal to start talks on setting up a Palestinian state.