Israeli Guard Shot to Death by Palestinian

JERUSALEM —  A masked Palestinian in the occupied West Bank shot an Israeli guard to death Monday, and an extremist Muslim group said the attack was to avenge the assassination of Hezbollah’s leader.

The shooting in Janin, a city of 30,000, came hours before Israelis and Palestinians resumed peace negotiations in Washington. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir decried the violence but said it would not interfere with the talks.

The assailant shot Leor Serlaker, 23, as he climbed down from a fuel truck he was guarding at a gas station, then fled with Serlaker’s Uzi submachine gun, the army said.

In Beirut, the group Islamic Jihad in Palestine claimed responsibility for the killing “to avenge the assassination of Sheik Abbas Moussawi and to assert the growth of the Islamic revolution in Palestine and Lebanon.”

Moussawi, leader of the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah, or Party of God, was killed in an Israeli helicopter raid in Lebanon last week.

Islamic Jihad in Palestine is a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist group that has claimed responsibility for other attacks in Israel. It is not known to have links to the Islamic Jihad--a group tied to Hezbollah, which held Western hostages in Lebanon.

Jewish settlers demanded that a military post near Janin be turned into a settlement to protest the shooting. “This is the only Zionist answer to the murder this morning in Janin,” the Council for Jewish Settlements said in a telegram to Shamir.

The army clamped a curfew on the town, which has been the center of an intense army and police search for Arabs who stabbed to death three Israeli soldiers on Feb. 14.