2 Observers Killed in West Bank

JERUSALEM — Two international monitors were killed Tuesday when their well-marked car came under fire near the West Bank city of Hebron.

A survivor and the Israeli army said the gunman was a Palestinian targeting a road often used by Jewish settlers. Palestinian officials blamed Israelis.

The two dead, a Turkish man and a woman who was described in some reports as Swiss and in others as Swedish, were members of a force of unarmed monitors created in 1994 to observe tensions between a tiny enclave of radical Jewish settlers and a large Palestinian majority in the Hebron area, in the wake of an assassination by a radical Jew of more than two dozen Palestinians worshiping at a mosque.

Turkish television identified the male observer as Maj. Cengiz Soytunc. Capt. Hussein Ozar Salam, also Turkish, was wounded, the report said. The woman was not immediately identified.

The observer group, the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, is much maligned, accused by Palestinians of being ineffectual and by Jewish settlers of being pro-Palestinian.

This is the first time that international monitors have been killed in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has claimed more than 1,500 lives in the last year and a half.

Salam said a Palestinian gunman shot at the car from close range, injuring him and killing the two other monitors.

The Palestinian Authority and Hebron hospital officials denied that Palestinians were involved and blamed the attack on the army.

Salam said he saw the gunman from the back seat.

“The [car] lights were on and we saw him. He was in a Palestinian police force uniform. He was carrying a Kalashnikov and we shouted to him that we are [from the observer force] TIPH, don’t shoot toward us. . . .

“He kept on shooting toward us and [my] colleagues were sitting in the front seat, just dead. The driver’s blood splashed on my face,” Salam told Israel Radio in an interview from the hospital.

Hebron Mayor Mustafa Natsheh said bullets recovered from the bodies, which were taken to a Palestinian hospital, were the type used by the Israeli army.

Hebron is one of the most volatile cities in the West Bank. About 450 Jewish settlers live in enclaves in the center of the city, among more than 100,000 Palestinians. The observers use clearly marked white cars.