ISRAEL: Israeli settler extremists yesterday shot dead a 14-year-old Palestinian girl, badly hurt her eight-year-old brother and injured a dozen more Palestinians in a rampage through Hebron, during a funeral procession for a soldier from the city who was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen on Friday.
An hour's drive away, thousands of mourners at the Psagot settlement attended the sombre funerals of three Israelis who were killed by the same Palestinian gunmen in the same shooting - a father, mother and their eight-year-old boy - whose deaths have left eight other siblings, aged two to 20, orphaned.
Hebron on the West Bank is the only city where hundreds of Jews live downtown amid tens of thousands of Palestinians and where control is usually divided between the Israeli army and the Palestinian Authority's security forces.
Israel has been reoccupying the city for more than the past month, however, and yesterday confined Palestinian residents to their homes as the body of soldier Elazar Liebovitz was carried from the Cave of the Patriarchs, through town, towards its burial place.
Photographers said armed settlers opened fire on Palestinian homes after participants in the funeral procession were stoned. Neveen Jamjoum was hit as she stood just inside her home, her mother said. Palestinians alleged last night she died because soldiers and settlers prevented her speedy evacuation to hospital.
Several dozen among the thousands of mourners also wreaked havoc in the city's open-air market and surrounding alleyways, overturning stalls and injuring at least 15 more Palestinians.
Local residents accused the army of failing to rein in the settlers. An Israeli policeman, whose force tried to restore calm, said the extremists had "madness in their eyes". Police said they had arrested two settlers last night. A settler spokesman said the fatal shots had been fired in self-defence.
The army is also still searching for Friday's assailants, who were members of a militant faction affiliated to the Fatah Tanzim.
At the same time, Fatah Tanzim leaders are understood to have renewed negotiations with Palestinian Authority officials on a possible end to suicide-bombings and other attacks on Israeli civilians. Fatah leader Mr Marwan Barghouti, held in detention, is said to be backing such an accord.
The Palestinian Authority's Finance Minister, Mr Salam Fayyad, today meets his Israeli counterpart, Mr Silvan Shalom. The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, yesterday said he would hold talks on reforms in the Palestinian Authority early next month.
Meanwhile, the American civil rights leader the Rev Jesse Jackson, on a five-day visit, urged Palestinians to use non-violent methods to press for change. In a sermon at St Stephen's Dominican church in Jerusalem's Old City, he declared: "Non-violence is resistance, not surrender, non-violence has moral authority, non-violence mobilises popular opinion."
Mr Jackson, who met Israel's Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, yesterday, said he would take the message to Mr Yasser Arafat today.
Earlier he said: "Israelis promote their military machine out of fear of suicide bombings, but Palestinians have known only occupation, malnutrition and despair."