THE PARENTS of an Israeli settler killed along with her husband by Arab gunmen held on to two things as they mourned yesterday a wedding photo and an unshakable belief the West Bank of the Jordan belongs to the Jews.
"I think a suitable answer to such a terrible event can be holding.. the land more strongly with our fingers, with nails deep, deep in the earth," said Mr Uri Dasberg, the father of Mrs Efrat Unger.
Efrat (25) and her husband Yaron (26) were shot dead inside Israel late on Sunday when Arab guerrillas with automatic weapons fired on the couple's car.
Their nine month old son, Ishai who was in the back seat, was unhurt. Newspaper photographs showed 15 bullet holes in the windscreen.
"I looked inside the car and saw a baby carriage," said Mr Yehuda Mesilati, who arrived at the scene immediately after the shooting.
"I broke the window to open the door, there were two bodies lying inside, one atop the other. Then I heard a tiny sound of crying.. .I thought I might tear his legs off but I got the baby out of there," Mr Mesilati said.
Efrat, a graphic artist, and Yaron, a Bible teacher, were both Orthodox Jews. Mrs Unger was two months pregnant, her family said. They were married on September 13th, 1993, the same day Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation signed their landmark peace deal at the White House.
"We hope they are the last victims of the Oslo accord," said Efrat's mother, Judith.
The couple was returning from a wedding to their apartment in Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement adjacent to Hebron and once home to Baruch Goldstein, the US born physician who massacred 29 Arabs in a Hebron mosque in February 1994.
At the Dasberg home, in the settlement of Alon Shvut, Efrat's mother clutched her daughter's wedding photograph and prepared for the funeral.
"They were always going back and forth inside Judea and Samaria the biblical names of the West Bank," she said.
"The one time they go outside the border, the Green Line, as you call it, something happens.
Later, thousands of settlers attended the funeral of the young couple.
"In their death we will not separate from these lands. They are flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone," said Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu.