Palestinian teen slain by militants

TEL AVIV -- Palestinian militants yesterday opened fire on a Palestinian family whose members were trying to keep the militants from firing rockets into Israel from the family's farm in the Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun, Gaza residents said. Hassan Za'aneen, a 15-year-old boy, was killed, and three other family members were wounded.

Later yesterday, militant leaders huddled with relatives of the slain boy, according to witnesses, and persuaded the family to declare the boy a martyr in the struggle against Israel. The shifting of the blame could lessen the possibility of revenge and provide material benefits to the boy's immediate family.

Za'aneen's death -- apparently the first to occur among Gaza civilians trying to prevent other Palestinians from attacking Israel -- raised tension in already-chaotic Gaza, where the Palestinian Authority is in a state of collapse and armed factions and militias are openly vying for power.

The Za'aneen clan, one of the largest in Gaza, initially refused to erect a mourning tent to receive extended family and friends after the killing, a decision understood by Palestinians to mean that revenge must be exacted before the usual customs attending a death are observed. The reputed shooter also is from a major clan.

Initially, leading Palestinian factions denied involvement in the shootings. After the family's intention to seek revenge was made known, faction representatives met in Beit Hanoun and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is part of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, and Islamic Jihad took responsibility. But the groups asserted that the shootings occurred in the chaos during a clash between themselves and Israeli special forces.

An Israel Defense Forces spokesman said that a Palestinian gunman opened fire on an Israeli armored vehicle around the same time as the Za'aneen shooting, and that Israeli troops returned fire but that there were no known casualties on either side. A senior official of the Palestinian General Intelligence Service said the Israelis had no involvement in the shootings at the Za'aneen home.

The mood surrounding the meeting between the boy's clan and the militant groups was extremely tense. Members of the family refused to talk with journalists, and witnesses to the morning clash and to the negotiations insisted that their names not be published out of concern for their safety.

Following the meeting, the black banners of Islamic Jihad and the yellow flags of Al Aqsa Brigades were raised, and the two militant groups issued a statement asserting: "Our mujahedeen have killed two Israeli soldiers during a clash that took place in Beit Hanoun/Salah Eddin. A number of Zionists have been wounded. During the clash, Hassan Jamil Za'aneen fell a martyr. A number of civilians were wounded, including two of our mujahedeen."

According to people at the scene, the clash began around midnight Thursday, when three masked men approached the house of Mohammed al Za'aneen and tried to set up a launcher to fire rockets into Israel.

Za'aneen told them that the last time rockets were fired from the family's property, Israeli forces destroyed the house, farm, and car and that the family did not want this to happen again.

The men left without incident, but returned yesterday morning with more rocket-firing machinery and were confronted by a crowd of Za'aneen family members, some of them armed. One of the militants, a well-known Beit Hanoun resident, tossed a grenade, wounding Hassan in the head.

Relatives put him in a car and were setting out for the nearest hospital, witnesses said, when the militants machine-gunned the car, killing Hassan with a shot through the chest. A Bedouin woman walking nearby was also wounded.

A wide range of Palestinian officials in Gaza and the West Bank scoffed at militants' assertions that the shootings could be framed as part of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation.

"Families in Beit Hanoun are trying very hard to prevent any shooting and rocketing from their lands," said Bassem Eid, Jerusalem-based director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, whose field representatives investigated yesterday's clash and previous, similar events. "The question is how to prevent this without causing damage to completely innocent people.

"People are getting more and more frustrated with this terrible intifadah," Eid said, using the Arabic term for the Palestinian-initiated battle that has consumed the region the past four years.

Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com