Israeli Killed by Bomb; 2 Arab Cousins Buried

JERUSALEM — An Israeli was killed and six others were injured late Saturday when a bomb blew up a van in which they were riding near the Jewish settlement of Matityahu west of the Palestinian town of Ramallah in the West Bank.

The incident was made public by Israel Radio in a report that was confirmed by a spokesman for the security forces.

The woman who was killed was the third Israeli to die in unrest during the last week. Earlier, an Israeli farmer was stabbed to death in a cabbage patch near the West Bank town of Janin and an Israeli agricultural technician was hacked to death with a hoe in a hothouse in the Gaza Strip.

In other developments Saturday:

* The hillside village of Jebel Mukaber on the West Bank buried two of its sons with the hard-edged grief that has come to characterize the Palestinian struggle for a national homeland.

* Three Palestinians were reported to have been shot to death by other Palestinians near Janin, a radical nationalist stronghold, apparently on suspicion they were Israeli collaborators.

* On the northern edge of the West Bank, Israeli youths continued to stone Arab cars in response to the killing there of the Israeli farmer. Police said they were stepping up security patrols but were having difficulty controlling the angry Israelis in the region.

The victims of Saturday night’s attack on the van were reported to be residents of a Tel Aviv suburb who had been visiting the Jewish settlement of Dolev.

A security spokesman said that a homemade explosive device was the suspected instrument of the attack. Israel Radio reported that the van caught fire and that the woman who died was trapped inside.

Israeli settlers are increasingly apprehensive about attacks by Palestinian radicals and are demanding greater protection by Israeli security forces.

The young men buried Saturday in Jebel Mukaber were cousins, both born on the same day in September, 1970.

Hussein Nimer Eibaidat, jailed three years ago on terrorism charges, died Wednesday, reportedly of “an inflammation of the heart,” following a two-week hunger strike with other “security prisoners.”

Mustafa Ali Eibaidat, a restaurant worker and father of two small children, died early Saturday of a chest wound after being shot last weekend by Israeli police during a protest in Jerusalem on behalf of the hunger strikers.

“They were friends as well as cousins, and they died for the Palestinian nation,” Mohammed Eibaidat, Hussein’s older brother, said. “They were as bound together in death as they were in life, struggling against Israeli oppression, struggling for a Palestinian homeland.”

The grief in the tightly knit village south of Jerusalem was deep over the deaths of the two young men, members of one of its most prominent families, and their joint funeral drew more than 5,000 into Jebel Mukaber’s streets and onto the ridges above the cemetery. Men vied for the chance to carry the caskets to the grave sites, and women wailed to share in the families’ pain.

Among the mourners, however, there was an even greater anger, for they assess the politics of the Middle East not in terms of peace conferences in Washington or visits to Jerusalem by French or Egyptian foreign ministers, but by what happens in the lives of the people of Jebel Mukaber.

“We need young people like Hussein and Mustafa Eibaidat, ready to do everything, including die, for their homeland,” Sheik Mohammed Hussein of Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque said in a graveside eulogy. “And, Allah be praised, Jebel Mukaber still gives her sons to the Palestinian cause.”

One of the village women, comforting Fatimah Eibaidat, the mother of Hussein, as they emerged from the village mosque, told her, “Now he is in paradise. He died a good death . . . he died for Palestine.”

And Afaf Eibaidat, the young widow of Mustafa, gave V-for-victory signs with both hands as she walked to the cemetery with the other grieving women.

The Palestinian flag--stripes of black, white and green with a red triangle on the left edge--flew from telephone and electric poles, from the village mosques and above the homes of the dead men. The walls of the village were covered with anti-Israeli slogans, spray-painted in red, green and black. And pictures of Hussein Eibaidat were everywhere, proclaiming him a martyr.

Police had gathered reinforcements in the valleys and on the high ground beyond Jebel Mukaber, but remained out of sight during the funeral. They turned back most delegations from elsewhere on the West Bank, according to Palestinian sources, to limit the size and political character of the funeral, but otherwise did not intervene.