Hebron tensions rise as settlers await eviction

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said paramilitary border police, better trained for riot control, will replace soldiers on duty in the area. Security officials estimated that 300 border police would be deployed.

The attacks on security forces drew condemnations from Israeli leaders. "We must be clear," President Shimon Peres said Wednesday. "If someone throws a stone at a soldier, it is as if he is throwing a stone at the state of Israel."

Settlers say about 20 families live in the building, but the population appears to fluctuate between a few dozen and a few hundred, in keeping with the rumors of impending evacuation that periodically send people rushing in from nearby settlements to resist.

The teenagers, whose average age appeared to be around 16, share a fetid portable toilet outside and seem to live off peanut butter, chocolate spread and boiled eggs provided by a nearby Jewish seminary.

In a large room with bare concrete walls and air heavy with the smell of unwashed bodies, youths rolled up bed mats as others performed their morning prayers.

One sign hung on the building invoked the Biblical patriarch Abraham, whose purchase of a burial plot in Hebron is seen by the settlers as the root of their historic right to the entire city. Another paraphrased the folk singer Woody Guthrie: "This land is our land."

Some of the girls wore T-shirts that read, "There will be war over the House of Peace."

One teenager with the long sidelocks of Orthodox Jews seated outside the house said he wasn't in school because "some things are more important."

A friend, a boy wearing a knitted black skullcap, said their goal was to eventually "kick all of the Arabs out of Hebron."

Like all of the teenagers at the building, they were distrustful of the news media and refused to give their names.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas demanded that Israel bring the situation under control.

"The Israeli government must understand that it has a duty to stop these thugs who continue to attack Palestinians. We hold the Israeli government responsible," Abbas said Wednesday.

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