Tel Aviv/Hebron - A violent stand-off between radical Israelis and Palestinians in Hebron elicited a storm of criticism in the Israeli media Wednesday, with most commentators calling for the settlers to be removed from a disputed house in the divided West Bank city.

More than two weeks of heightened tensions in Hebron boiled over Tuesday, when dozens of settlers rioted, throwing stones at Palestinians and at Israeli police and soldiers, spray-painting slogans and damaging graves.

Local Palestinians also hurled stones at the settlers, seriously injuring an Israeli teenager who was hit in the head.

The rioting erupted after some 1,500 Jewish settlers arrived in Hebron late Monday amid rumours that the Israeli authorities were about to forcibly evacuate a disputed house occupied by settlers.

Israel's supreme court on November 16 ordered the Israeli government to evacuate what is know in the Israeli media as the "House of Contention."

The Yediot Ahronot daily quoted unnamed army officials as accusing the settlers of wanting the situation in the southern West Bank city to deteriorate at all costs in order to prevent the evacuation of the house.

"They want to spark a religious war that will inflame the entire region," the daily quoted a high-ranking officer as saying.

Legislator Ariyeh Eldad, normally a champion of Israeli settlement in the West Bank, told Israel Army Radio Wednesday that the settler youth barricaded in the Hebron house "is a different youth; this is youth that has no God, no rabbis and no leaders."

More scathing was an unnamed military official, who told the Israel HaYom daily that "the settlers are behaving just like anti- Semites abroad, who spray-paint hate slogans on synagogues."

Writing in the Ma'ariv daily, commentator Ofer Shelah blamed the violence in Hebron on months of "wholesale law-breaking in the occupied territories," which he said authorities did nothing to curb.

"Everyone is to blame," he said, including the prime minister and defence minister, and the army's top brass.

The Israel Defence Force declared Hebron a closed military zone Tuesday night, to prevent the passage of settler activists to Palestinian neighbourhoods.

The army also decided to station a special Border Police unit in the city, due to the intensification of the clashes. (dpa)