Palestinian shoots three teenagers in Jewish settlement

Three Israeli students were killed by a Palestinian guerrilla who infiltrated a Jewish settlement last night, raising the domestic pressure on Ariel Sharon to find a new solution to stop Palestinian attacks.

The gunman penetrated Itamar, a settlement near Nablus in the occupied West Bank, in an area which has seen regular conflict between Jewish settlers and the Palestinians. He was eventually shot dead by a settler.

Israeli witnesses said that the three students were shot while they were studying in a religious seminary in Itamar. It was the second assault within a few hours. Yesterday evening a Palestinian gunman shot dead an Israeli motorist in the West Bank near Jerusalem, and wounded his cousin. Only a day earlier, a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber killed a grandmother and her 18-month-old baby near Tel Aviv.

Although Itamar is regarded by many Israelis as a hardline radical settlement, the killing of teenagers will cause outrage and add to the growing concern in Israel over the resumption of Palestinian attacks. A wave of suicidal attacks has begun only a month after the end of Israel's major military offensive into West Bank towns in which several hundred Palestinians died and thousands were detained. Twenty-two Israelis have been killed inside Israel by suicide bombings in the past month.

With no sign of any new ideas on the diplomatic front, Israel is resorting to a pattern of tightening its lock-down of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, conducting daily army raids into Palestinian-administered parts of the West Bank – and the occasional assassination. It continues to blame Yasser Arafat for doing nothing to stop the attacks, although there is little evidence that he has the power to do so, and to demand reforms of the Palestinian Authority as a condition for negotiations.

Israel's Ministry of Defence is responding by speeding up moves to create a fence, with trenches and earthworks, to keep West Bank Palestinians out of Israel. Plans to build the fence's first stage, which will be up to 50 miles in length, are being pushed forward by the Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.

Yarden Vatikai, a Defence Ministry spokesman, said last night that work on the barrier system would begin in the "next week or so".

It will include a fence – which is expected to have an electro-sensitive warning system, like the fence that surrounds the Gaza Strip – along the north-western edge of the West Bank and north of Jerusalem.

Monday's attack, which killed a baby, caused particular revulsion inside Israel and abroad over the use of suicide bombers by Palestinian extremists, and was condemned by the Palestinian Authority. But there was strong support in Nablus's Balata refugee camp, an impoverished shanty-town and home of the 18-year-old bomber, Jibril Titi.

Last week, Titi's cousin – a local leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades – was assassinated by Israel along with two other militants while they were meeting in a local cemetery. Reports yesterday said that one of Titi's brothers was paralysed after being hit by shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell when Israeli forces raided the refugee camp recently. The building of the fence – or "obstacle", as Israeli officials prefer to call it – has prompted concern it could eventually become a "de facto" border.