JERUSALEM, Oct. 13, 2000 News on the Internet alerted Hani Avrahami to the brutal killing of two Israeli soldiers and sent her rushing to call her husband, a reserve soldier. His cellular phone rang and rang until a strange voice answered.

I just killed your husband, the gruff voice said.

Israeli media reports of the last, desperate phone calls of the two widows to their husbands gripped Israelis today. Many were horrified by the television footage of Palestinians cheering as one of the soldier’s bodies was thrown out a second-story window and pummeled by the furious Palestinian crowd.

Yossi Avrahami, a 38-year-old toy salesman and a father of three, was stabbed and beaten to death with another soldier in his reserve unit after they took a wrong turn Thursday and ended up in the middle of a funeral in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

A Palestinian mob, angry over two weeks of fighting with Israelis that has left more than 90 people dead, attacked them after they were taken to a police station.

Irina called the cellular phone number a few times and no one answered and in the afternoon [the military] called to say he hadn’t reached the point, Anna Norjitz said of her sister-in-law’s efforts to reach her husband. And then the police came and she understood Vadim was dead.

Irina Norjitz is three months pregnant, relatives told the Haaretz newspaper.

Norjitz’s father asked to turn on the television Thursday night as relatives gathered in his home. But the family wouldn’t let him watch, the daily reported.

Norjitz was buried today and Avrahami was to be buried Sunday, the army said.

Update 28September2003

A woman holds up her red-painted hand as she protests against the US troops in Iraq and against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian areas at a demonstration in Berlin on Saturday, Sept. 27, 2003. About 300 people took part at the protest in the German capital. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

The IDF and Shin Bet security service recently arrested two more suspects in the lynching of two reservists in Ramallah last October - including the youth seen in the famous television shot of the lynching as he leaned out of the police station window and waved bloody hands at the mob.

The two reservists, Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami, took a wrong turn into Ramallah on October 17 and were arrested by Palestinian police, who took them to the local police station. There, a Palestinian mob beat the two to death and mutilated their bodies.

So far 15 suspects have been arrested and some of them have already been indicted. Security sources said yesterday Israel will continue trying to catch all those involved.

The two new arrests are Abed al-Aziz Tzalha, 20, of Dir-Jarir and Mohammed Nuara, 18, of Mizara al-Kabaliyah. Both live in Area B - under Palestinian civilian but Israeli security control.

Tzalha admitted he was the youth at the window in the television shots, waving his bloodstained hands. (Early reports of this man being arrested were wrong.) Tzalha said he burst into the police station, ran up the stairs to where the two soldiers were being held, and grabbed one and started choking him while other Palestinians beat him.

Nuara, a Tanzim activist, admitted stabbing one of the soldiers. Both men will soon be indicted in Beit El military court.