JERUSALEM — The Palestinian prime minister said Saturday that his security forces had arrested a number of suspects in the killings of two off-duty Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and had given Israeli authorities weapons taken from the dead men by their attackers.
Sharing a podium with Israeli President Shimon Peres at an economic conference near Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad expressed “heartfelt” condolences to the families of the Israelis and sought to limit diplomatic fallout for peace talks that just restarted after a seven-year hiatus.
“In spite of our best efforts, from time to time our relations get tested with an incident like this, unfortunately,” he said. “This is a sad reality. It’s something that we have to deal with.”
Peres responded positively, speaking, like Fayyad, in English.
“The way you expressed yourself, and your government did, on the last incident is encouraging for us,” he said. “It was a painful experience, but we are listening very carefully to your reaction, both in what you said and what you do.”
The two armed off-duty soldiers were hiking Friday in hills north of the Palestinian town of Hebron in the West Bank when they were attacked by a group of Palestinian gunmen in a car. They returned fire and killed one of their attackers before they died.
A female companion hiking with the soldiers fled the attack and escaped unharmed after hiding among trees.
The killings posed a new challenge for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks formally relaunched at a U.S.-hosted Mideast summit last month.
