Saed Dawabsha’s death trying to save family blamed on extremists

Jewish extremists are suspected in the death of a Palestinian man whose infant son also perished in an arson attack.

Nine Israeli settlers have been ­arrested in tightly co-ordinated raids tied to the investigation of a “terrorist’’ firebombing that killed a Palestinian man and his infant son, horrifying the nation.

The roundup came the day after Saed Dawabsha, 32, died of the burns sustained while pulling his wife and a surviving child from the inferno of their home in the West Bank village of Duma. Baby Ali, 18 months, could not be saved.

Mr Dawabsha’s funeral provided an outlet for Palestinian anger over violence by radical Israeli settlers and accusations that the perpetrators had mostly gotten away with it.

A spokesman for the Islamist group Hamas, which controls the Palestinian territory of Gaza, called yesterday for “open and comprehensive confrontation’’ on the occupied West Bank.

Hebrew graffiti sprayed on the walls of the Dawabshas’ gutted house and the proximity of an Israeli settlement put settlers in the frame, as Benjamin Netanyahu reflected revulsion in Israel at the targeting of a family home in the July 31 attack.

The Prime Minister affirmed after Mr Dawabsha’s death that the state would “use all the tools at our disposal to apprehend the murderers’’.

Last night, two people were ­arrested at a settler outpost near Duma. Another seven were taken into custody during a separate raid by police and agents of the Shin Bet security service on a compound near the Kochav Hashachar settlement in a northwest corner of the West Bank.

Tensions were running high after thousands attended funeral procession chanting “God is great’’ and waving the Palestinian flag, as well as those of Hamas and the rival Fatah movement entrenched on the West Bank.

The Israeli army reported incidents of rock throwing afterwards, but no casualties. With emotions running high, security forces are on guard for possible revenge ­attacks.

Voicing Palestinian outrage, family member Anwar Dawabsha said the deaths should have been prevented. “It’s a crime committed by the settlers but with the agreement of the (Israeli) occupation,’’ he told the news service Agence-France Presse.

“It isn’t possible that Israel with all its army and its intelligence services still has no information on this attack.”

The firebombing happened a day after a Jewish religious fanatic stabbed six people participating in a gay pride march in Jerusalem, killing a 16-year-old girl.

The attacks have trained a spotlight on the violent fringe of Israeli nationalism and religious activism that spills into the settler movement.

One of the three men detained after the Duma murders is Meir Ettinger, 24, the grandson of extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, who was assassinated in 1990 after founding the now-banned ultra-nationalist group Kach to expel Arabs from the biblical lands of ­Israel.

Ettinger is being held under a six-month administrative detention order, a punitive measure in the past reserved for Palestinian detainees. He is said to be a leader of a Kach-related youth underground, but neither he nor the other detainees have been charged in over the arson atrocity.

Writing in The New York Times, senior government minister Naftali Bennett, an avowed right-winger who opposes the two-state model for a Palestinian homeland, ripped into the Jewish extremists, arguing they represented no one but themselves and had to be “eradicated swiftly and forcefully’’.

However, Israeli Arab MP Zouheir Bahloul said the investigation into the deadly firebombing needed to turn up more than a “few showcase arrests’’.