On Saturday morning, April 27th, a trio of Palestinian gunmen cut through the wire fence surrounding the 50-family settlement of Adora, not far from the West Bank city of Hebron, and shot dead four of the residents, including a five-year-old.
Now, three months later, Israeli police have arrested a group of 10 soldiers and ex-soldiers from Adora and other nearby settlements, on suspicion of selling hundreds of thousands of stolen Israeli army bullets for M-16 automatic rifles to Palestinian gunmen.
Police sources hint that many more arrests are imminent, and that the bullet sales are "only the tip of the iceberg".
They have intimated that members of the gang may have been involved in selling stolen automatic rifles as well, and one of them is alleged to have accepted bribes to allow Palestinian lorries to travel without being searched through a nearby border crossing point - where security is sky-high because of Israel's fear of suicide bombers.
Perhaps most extraordinarily, police sources said yesterday that the settler gang continued to sell ammunition to the gunmen even after the attack on their own settlement, in which, incidentally, at least one of the gunmen used an M-16.
The latest man arrested, and brought to court yesterday, is Mr Eran Mulai, a military policeman stationed in Hebron. Mr Mulai, arrested at his family's home at Adora, is alleged, along with his brother, who is also in detention, to have transferred the stolen ammunition to local members of the Fatah Tanzim, a militia loyal to the PA President Yasser Arafat that has claimed responsibility for a string of attacks on Israelis this year.
The snowballing saga of the ammunition sales is shocking Israelis, particularly because members of a settlement attacked by Palestinian gunmen are involved, but also because settlers are generally perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be highly nationalistic and therefore unlikely to get involved in this kind of activity.
The parents of the Mulai brothers are understood to have disappeared from Adora since the scandal broke. The father of one of the other suspects is said to have collapsed with heart trouble on hearing the news. Some residents insist they cannot believe their neighbours are guilty, or speak of rumours that the suspects were threatened by the Palestinian gunmen and had no choice but to cooperate.
The tale points to extraordinary laxity in the army's security procedures. Israeli military officials resolutely refuse to say how much more, or what kind of weaponry has been stolen from its stores in recent years and sold to the Palestinians. But there has been no disputing an assertion made by Mr Arafat earlier this year that he had storehouses overflowing with all kinds of Israeli army weaponry.
Meanwhile yesterday, a faction of the Fatah Tanzim issued a leaflet threatening to kill Israel's Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon, his predecessor Mr Ehud Barak, current and former army chiefs of staff, top officers and other named politicians, in revenge for the Monday night Israeli airstrike in Gaza City.
In what was described as a first such revenge attack, early yesterday morning, gunmen shot dead Rabbi Elimelech Shapira, a 43-year-old father of eight, on the road near the West Bank settlement of Alei Zahav, outside Qalkilya.
Amid reports that 70 per cent of Palestinians now subsist on less than $2 a day, the US Ambassador to Israel, Mr Dan Kurtzer, yesterday urged Israel to ease restrictions on Palestinians in order to "prevent a humanitarian disaster". One in five Palestinian children is said to suffer severe malnutrition.