Israel Hunts Palestinian Suspects after W.Bank Settler Killing

Israeli soldiers carried out a manhunt Friday in the occupied West Bank, a day after the army blamed Palestinians for shooting dead an Israeli settler and wounding two others.

The army, which said Palestinian "terrorists" carried out the attack, has deployed three extra battalions as well as special forces.

"We are in a physical, technological, intelligence hunt," Israeli army spokesman Brigadier General Ran Kochav told 103FM radio.

"We arrested last night a number of suspects... sooner or later we will find the perpetrators."

The victim was named as religious student Yehuda Dimentman, 25, a married father and an Israeli settler.

Thursday's shooting was the latest violence, following Palestinian attacks on Israelis and the killing of Palestinians by Israeli troops during clashes.

Israel seized the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War. Since then nearly 700,000 Jewish Israelis have moved into West Bank and east Jerusalem settlements, that much of the international community regards as illegal.

Dimentman was shot while in a car while leaving the illegal outpost of Homesh on Thursday evening, and died en route to hospital, the Israeli army and medics said.

Two others in the car were injured by shattered glass, but their wounds were not reported to be serious.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but multiple Palestinian organisations -- including Hamas, the militant Islamist group which controls the Gaza Strip -- praised the shooting.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price condemned the killing of Dimentman, calling it a "terrorist attack."

- Clashes -

In Burqah, a village near to where the attack on Thursday took place, an AFP reporter saw settlers hurling stones at homes, with hundreds of Palestinian residents mobilising and Israeli soldiers deployed.

Elsewhere in the northern West Bank, Israeli police said they were investigating reports from the village of Qaryut that a Palestinian man had been hospitalised after settlers stormed his home.

On Friday, mourners gathered to remember Dimentman.

"We will continue onward and we won't be broken," his brother Shlomi said.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called Dimentman a "wise student full of love for Israel", adding that "a Jew was murdered only because of being a Jew living in his land".

Settler leader Yossi Dagan demanded the government respond by approving the settlement of Homesh, which Israel dismantled in 2005, but where settlers have since run a religious school.

The attack on Thursday was the latest violence in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Last week Israeli police arrested a 14-year-old Palestinian girl suspected of stabbing her Israeli neighbour --  a 26-year-old mother walking with her children -- in annexed east Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood.

On Monday, Jamil Al-Kayyal, a 31-year-old Palestinian man, was killed during a clash with Israeli forces in Nablus.

Tensions have also been rising within Israel's ideologically divided coalition government over reports of violence by settlers on Palestinians.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) last month said there had been 410 attacks by settlers against Palestinians  -- against individuals and on property -- in the first 10 months of this year.

On Monday, Israeli Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev said he had discussed "settler violence and how to reduce tensions" in a meeting with the US State Department's Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland.

Bennett, a former settler leader, said settler violence was "marginal."