BAT AYIN, West Bank (AP) – A Palestinian killed an Israeli teenager with a pickaxe and seriously injured a seven-year-old boy in a rampage through this West Bank Jewish settlement yesterday, posing an early test for the country’s new hard-line government.

Israeli media broadcast pictures of the body of 13-year-old Shlomo Nativ, bespectacled with long sidecurls and a large skullcap worn by observant Jews. The images also showed the red pickaxe on the ground with drops of blood splattered on a road.

The attacker escaped the scene and Israeli troops, joined by bearded settlers armed with automatic rifles, were conducting a manhunt in the area. In the nearby Palestinian village of Safa, troops searched houses and rounded up residents in a schoolyard. The military said all roads around the settlement of Bat Ayin were closed.

The settlement is notorious in Israel for being the base of the so-called “Bat Ayin Underground”, whose members were arrested over a botched 2002 bombing on an Arab girls’ school in Jerusalem. The wounded boy’s father, a member of the underground, is currently serving a 15-year sentence for his involvement in that bombing attempt.