TEHRAN A senior West Bank official of Palestinian Leader's Yasser Arafat Fatah Faction was shot dead on Sunday in an Israeli assassination.

Thabet Thabet, a 49-year-old dentist, was shot in the chest and legs as he left his house in the Palestinian-ruled city of Tulkarm, in an area adjacent to Israeli-controlled territory, the officials said.

Marwan Barghouthi, one of Fatah's most prominent leaders, held Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak responsible for the killing, which came against the backdrop of a three-month-old Palestinian uprising and U.S. efforts to revive peacemaking.

"Barak has opened the gates of hell on himself," Barghouthi told Reuters.

The officials blamed Israeli undercover units for Thabet's death, which came three hours after Israeli settler Binyamin Kahane, and his wife were shot dead by Palestinians in another part of the West Bank.

A senior Fatah official said he believed the "assassination (of Thabet) was planned and carried out after study and approval" and not as swift revenge for the Kahane shooting.

Meanwhile, as clashes between Palestinians and Israeli settlers flared up yesterday Binyamin Kahane, son of the terrorist anti-Arab Rabbi Meir Kahane, and his wife were killed by Palestinian gunmen in an ambush on their van in the West Bank on Sunday. He was responsible for the genocide of the Palestinians as well as setting their homes on fire.

Five of the couple's children traveling in the vehicle, girls ranging in age from two months to 10 years, were wounded, one of them seriously, in the attack near the Jewish settlement of Ofra, north of Ramallah.

A group calling itself the Martyrs of the Al-Aqsa Intifada claimed responsibility in a statement faxed to an international news agency in Beirut, saying it had opened fire with machine guns on a passing settlers' car.

Kahane's father, a U.S.-born terrorist, Meir Kahane, was shot dead in 1990 by an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen in New York. The elder Kahane founded the anti-Arab and terrorist Kach Movement and advocated forcibly evicting Arabs from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

Death of Kahane came a day after Fatah Faction called for an escalation of the uprising against Israeli soldiers and Jews living in settlements deemed illegal under international conventions.

Palestinian Communication Minister Imad Faluji said Sunday that killing Jewish settlers was "a Palestinian right" and called on settlers to leave before being killed.

"Killing settlers is a Palestinian right. It will never be safe for any settler in our Palestinian land," Faluji told reporters.

He called on settlers to leave "Palestine before leaving in caskets."

Faluji is a member of Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah Faction, but was formerly part of the movement Hamas.

In another development, AFP reported from Lebanon that negotiations for a prisoner exchange are still alive between the Lebanese Shia movement Hizbollah and Israel, via German mediation.

Though the negotiations have not produced an agreement, Hizbollah's second-in-command Sheikh Naim Kassem told the Lebanese daily Al-Mustaqbal that a German mediator "came to Beirut and then left, but continues to work on the case."

Kassem added that Hizbollah was waiting for responses following questions raised by his movement during the negotiations, but the Shia official did not reveal what these points were, nor did he disclose the identity of the mediator.

Hizbollah considers any information on the health of the Israeli prisoners to be "an element of the negotiations and to have a price," he said.

"However, we have not yet received that price from the Israelis," he added.

Hizbollah, which spearheaded the struggle against Israel's 22-year occupation of Lebanon, captured three Israeli soldiers during an October 7 raid on an army post in the disputed Shebaa farms border area.

Hizbollah announced October 18 that it had captured a fourth Israeli, who it said was a colonel working for his country's intelligence services. Israel has said he is only a businessman.

On Friday, government sources in Vienna announced that Austrian Defense Minister Herbert Scheibner has been acting as a mediator in talks on the fate of Lebanese detainees in Israel and Israeli soldiers held by the Hizbollah.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, meanwhile, said Saturday that Israeli electors must choose between him and war in the upcoming election.

Barak, quoted by a Russian news agency, said that his uphill bid for reelection has no influence over the decisions he is making in the process of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

"I will not permit myself the slightest compromise that I would not have made in a normal situation," Barak was quoted by the Interfax news agency here as saying. "I will know what to do even if I lose the post of prime minister," he added.

If any proposal served "to protect Israel, guarantee its safety, preserve its national identity and, at the same time, stop our military cemeteries from expanding," he would take the step, Barak said.

This "direct and truthful approach" just might help him win the reelection, he said.

"In fact the choice is between Barak and war," he claimed.

Barak also praised Russia's "special, very important" role as mediator in the Middle East peace process, saying that the Israeli side keeps Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov informed of the way the peace talks are developing.

Together with the United States, Russia is a cosponsor of the Middle East process, but its formerly significant influence in the region has drastically waned and its mediation efforts have ended in failure.