ATARA, West Bank - The villagers lowered Fatima Hassan Abeida into the hard ground yesterday and quickly shoveled dirt onto her body in a cemetery littered with broken headstones and covered by a tangle of vines and weeds.

She was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier Tuesday while sitting in a taxi after buying holiday sweets, and her name is but one more to add to a burgeoning list of victims, Palestinian and Israeli, killed in recent weeks while performing the most ordinary of activities.

It is her age that sets her apart from most of the dead. Abeida was 95, according to her account of being born in 1907 during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. She is believed to be the oldest Palestinian killed in this conflict, now in its third year.

"God bless her and find a place for her in heaven," Atteya Mohammed, the leader of Atara's mosque, told the mourners during a graveside eulogy. "The bullet that hit her was made to kill innocent people."

In this long-running war in which each side cites examples of what it says is the other's brutality, children and the elderly are the most obvious innocent victims.

This is supposed to be a festive time for Jews and Muslims, who are celebrating their respective holidays of Hanukkah and Eid al-Fitr, the feast marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. But the past two weeks have been marred by a surge of violence, with funerals replacing parties on both sides of the conflict. Families gather to grieve rather than to celebrate.

Israeli soldiers enforcing curfews in the West Bank have opened fire on people rushing to buy food and gifts for the holiday, wounding dozens and killing several teens. Last week, Palestinian militants shot six Israelis to death as they voted in an election primary, and three Israeli tourists on a Hanukkah vacation to Kenya returned home in coffins after being killed by suicide bombers at a seaside hotel.

As a result, Israeli soldiers are clamping down harder in the West Bank, just when Palestinians are more inclined to cross or evade army checkpoints to visit friends and family or shop for food.

'She wasn't scared'

Abeida, despite her age, traveled every week from this village, six miles south of Ramallah. She insisted on going alone, bracing herself with her wooden cane to climb over dirt mounds erected by the army to block roads, and changing cabs three times.

At the army checkpoint nearest her village, Abeida always refused to show soldiers her identification card and ignored shouts for her to stop. Soldiers usually let the elderly woman pass.

"She wasn't scared of anything," said her daughter, Aisha Sarahneh, 58, sitting on her mother's patio, under an awning made of grapevines woven in a wooden lattice. "We weren't worried about Israeli soldiers. We were scared that she would get hit by a car. But she always refused our help."

On Tuesday, Abeida made her weekly shopping trip to Ramallah. She bought baklava dripped in honey and clothes for her great-grandchildren, and then got into a minivan taxi to start her journey home before dark.

How she ended up dead is a reflection of the shifting rules that govern travel in the West Bank, rules that change according to each soldier's interpretation and enforcement. The cabdriver used a road that the army has dubbed "Chaos Alley" because it usually is crowded with Palestinian pedestrians. It had been declared off-limits to Palestinian cars, but soldiers usually granted taxis an exception.

New patrol

On Tuesday, however, a new group of soldiers was on patrol, and they stopped every vehicle bearing the green-and-white license plates issued to Palestinians. When a soldier saw the minivan Abeida was in, according to the army, he fired a warning shot in the air from 100 yards away.

The van didn't stop, and the soldier ran toward the vehicle while firing his M-16 machine gun at its tires. Several of the 17 bullets that he fired struck people inside. A 41-year-old woman traveling with her two children was wounded in the leg. Abeida was struck in the back and died instantly.

Army officials said yesterday that the soldier faces a disciplinary hearing for inappropriately firing at the vehicle, which they said was driving away from him and posed no immediate threat. But they also said alerts of attacks are so frequent that soldiers are on edge and leaving nothing to chance.

"In hindsight, it looks like a horrible mistake," said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli army spokesman. "But you have to put yourself in the mind of the soldiers. There is a car on a road it shouldn't be on, and it refuses to stop. The soldiers don't see a 95-year-old woman. They see a car speeding ahead. It is an immediate cause for suspicion."

Appeal to conscience

Mourners in Atara had little sympathy for such nuance. An ambulance yesterday brought Abeida's body to an army checkpoint, where villagers put it on a stretcher, draped it in a red blanket and covered that with a green banner representing the militant group Hamas.

They paraded her body about a mile to her one-room stone house and through the arched doorway, then onto the mosque for prayers and finally to the hillside cemetery. Children held up posters of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and hung a sign that read, "Message to the international conscience: What does it mean to kill an old woman?"

Her family gathered in the house - a dark, cold place decorated only with a few faded photographs of Abeida's father, husband and son, all long since dead. She had held court while sitting on the edge of her bed, sharing stories with anyone and everyone who stopped by.

Abeida's favorite subject was growing up in a farming village south of Jerusalem, where her father herded sheep. She was 10 when the British captured Jerusalem in 1917 and 41 when Israel became a nation in 1948. That year, she left her village, now in Israel, and moved to Atara in the West Bank.

After Abeida was shot, her body was brought to Sheik Zayed Hospital in Ramallah. By chance, Sarahneh was there, visiting Abedia's latest great-grandson, Quassy Sarahneh, who had been born a few hours earlier in the same hospital.

"One was born, and another one died," Sarahneh said quietly. Joy was once again tempered by death.