Suspected Palestinian infiltrators took over a house in a Jewish settlement near Nablus on Thursday, killing five Israelis and wounding eight others, settlers and rescue workers said.
Israel Radio said the dead included a mother, three of her children and a soldier who was shot when the military stormed the house. One of the infiltrators was killed in an exchange of fire. A second jumped out the window and exchanged fire with soldiers.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's spokesman called it a ``horrendous attack'' and promised an Israeli response.
Paramedic Hezi Tzuriel told Israel Radio that the second floor of the house in the West Bank settlement of Itamar caught fire.
Settlers said soldiers broke into the house to engage the infiltrators.
A neighbor, Rinat Cabra, said there were seven children in the family living in the house, and that the father was not home.
``We heard screaming. We closed the house and then the army started to come,'' another settler, Yaacov Heiman, told Israel Radio. ``It's a horrible feeling.''
Itamar, where some of the most militant Israeli settlers in the West Bank live, is not fenced in. Settlers insist the whole West Bank belongs to the Jews. On May 29, a Palestinian gunman attacked a high school at the settlement, killing three Israeli teen-agers.
In the claim of responsibility, the caller told The Associated Press that the attack was in response to the arrest of a PFLP leader and Israel's attempt to separate the West Bank from Israel.
Israel Radio said Sharon left a public event when he was told of the attack and convened top advisers at his Tel Aviv office.
``This is a horrendous attack, and there always has to be a response for such things,'' said Sharon's spokesman, Raanan Gissin.
On Thursday, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat condemned attacks against Israeli civilians, but Palestinian officials have always differentiated between Israelis inside Israel and those who live in the West Bank, claimed by Palestinians for a state.
(China Daily June 21, 2002)
