ISRAEL LEVELS FAMILY HOME OF SUNDAY SUICIDE BOMBER.

Byline: Neil MacFarquhar The New York Times

Israeli troops dynamited the rented family home of a Palestinian suicide bomber Friday, part of a series of punitive measures being carried out by the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to underscore that violent opposition to their peace treaty would be met with similar force.

"We have two things to do: to strike Hamas and to bring about peace," Prime Minister Shimon Peres said, referring to the militant group that has taken responsibility for most of the recent bombings against Israelis. He was speaking to supporters who staged a rally for peace outside his house.

In a scene reminiscent of the Israeli response during the uprising against its occupation, Israeli soldiers kept the northern West Bank village of Burka under curfew while they detonated explosives around the two-room stone house used by the family of Rayid Shagnoubi. Shagnoubi blew himself up Sunday on a Jerusalem bus, killing 18 people.

With smoke and dust billowing overhead, youths defied the curfew, pouring into the street to stone the soldiers, while village women stood by slapping their cheeks in a sign of mourning and cursing the soldiers' fathers. Most of the bomber's relatives have left the village.

"This will not stop people from struggling against the occupation," said Aysha Awdeh, 72, whose brother owned the house.

Aside from plans to blow up two more homes of suicide bombers in the West Bank, officials said, Israel was contemplating a return to its policy of deporting any Palestinians linked to attacks against Israel, including the extended families of suicide bombers. Officials also kept up the pressure on Yasser Arafat to replace cosmetic search-and-seizure operations with arrests of the ringleaders behind the attacks.

To answer Palestinian accusations that the explosives used in the bus attacks might have come from outside sources, even from extremist Israelis trying to unseat the Labor government, the Israeli police held a detailed briefing about the bombs.

Police said the bombs, weighing 60 pounds and carried in duffel bags, had been constructed from land mines unearthed in the Gaza Strip and left over from the 1967 Middle East War.