Israeli Woman Killed in West Bank

JERUSALEM — A Palestinian gunman killed an Israeli woman and seriously wounded her husband in the West Bank late Saturday, while the head of the CIA and the Palestinian interior minister met outside Washington and discussed security reforms.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said the woman was killed when a gunman raided the settlement of Mehora in the Jordan Valley. Troops then killed the gunman, she said.

Earlier, Israeli troops killed a gunman who had tried to enter the Jewish settlement of Niram in the Gaza Strip. Troops also shot dead a 53-year-old Palestinian municipal worker going about his duties in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Meanwhile, CIA Director George J. Tenet met Palestinian Interior Minister Abdel Razak Yehiyeh for about 90 minutes at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., just outside Washington.

Although no statement was released after the morning meeting, the discussion in part covered Yehiyeh’s plan to end corruption and mismanagement within the police and unify and retrain the Palestinian preventive security forces, according to sources close to the Palestinians.

Yehiyeh told Tenet that he is revamping what remains of a Palestinian security force that he said has been decimated by the Israelis. He also said he is firing Palestinian officers found to be incompetent, sources said.

Yehiyeh is looking to Egypt and Jordan, along with the United States, to help train the restructured Palestinian security forces, the sources said. He also talked of using the Jordanian model of a national police force that unites police and security forces under one command.

No group took responsibility for the shooting of the woman in the West Bank on Saturday, but the Islamic militant group Hamas claimed the man seeking to infiltrate Niram in Gaza as one of its own. Hamas has stepped up its attacks since Israel killed its military commander in the Gaza Strip along with more than a dozen other Palestinians in an airstrike last month.

As for the slaying of the worker in Nablus, Israel’s army expressed its regret. The man was driving an electrical repair van that was marked as authorized to travel in the city despite an Israeli curfew.

“This just goes to show how insufferable our situation is--even those supposedly permitted to be out and about are at risk,” Nablus Mayor Ghassan Shaka said.

The Israeli army has reoccupied much of the West Bank, with curfews and closures causing widespread economic problems. Israel says the measures are needed to keep out suicide bombers.

Elsewhere on Saturday, Dafna Spruch, 62, an Israeli employee at Hebrew University who was wounded in a Palestinian bombing at the school July 31, died. Her death brought the toll in the attack to eight, five of them Americans.

In addition, two Palestinians in Gaza, 13-year-old Ayman abu Mughaseb and 78-year-old Khader Saedi died of wounds suffered previously in separate Israeli military actions, hospital officials said.

Also Saturday, Israel blocked U.S. peace activists traveling with American congressional staff members from entering the West Bank on a fact-finding mission to the Palestinian territories and Israel, according to the activists, the State Department and an Israeli official.

The activists were three representatives of the American Muslims for Jerusalem organization and Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel organization, said Josh Ruebner, who heads the latter group. He said they planned to meet with American and international humanitarian organizations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.