Israel Steps Up Probe of Jewish Extremists in W. Bank : Mideast: Police suspect several of planning terrorist killings of Palestinians. Crackdown ordered by Rabin brings charges of harassment.

JERUSALEM —  Israeli police Monday widened their investigation of extremist Jewish settlers suspected of planning terrorist killings of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to foment widespread violence in the region and thus undercut peace efforts.

Three more men were detained--two in pre-dawn raids on their homes and the third, an army officer, at a military base. This brought to at least 11, including two army officers, to be arrested on security charges in the past two weeks, and senior Israeli officials said more arrests are likely.

Although police have refused to outline the alleged conspiracy or to specify charges against the suspects, Police Minister Moshe Shahal said over the weekend that the group was planning a major attack soon on Palestinians in the Jerusalem area as part of a terrorist campaign.

“We stopped them just on the brink of action,” Shahal said.

While most of the men are suspected of getting weapons and planning a series of terrorist attacks, some are also being questioned about the murders of three Palestinians in December and of a Jerusalem taxi driver three months ago, security officials said.

“We are not talking about a group of stone-throwers, Palestinians or Jews,” a senior security official told Haaretz, the country’s leading newspaper. “We are talking about a group of people who are suspected of planning to kill innocent Arab residents. . . . The detainees are suspected of activity stemming from ideological motives.”

The group has been dubbed the Jewish Underground of Revenge, an informal title that recalls an earlier movement broken up in 1984 with the arrest of 27 people, most of them settlers, on charges of attacking Arabs.

Most of those detained in the past two weeks are Jewish settlers from Kiryat Arba, an ultranationalist settlement near the West Bank city of Hebron, where Baruch Goldstein, an American-born settler, massacred about 30 Palestinians in a mosque in February. Beaten to death by surviving Palestinians, Goldstein is now regarded by many in Kiryat Arba as a martyr.

Monday’s crackdown, ordered by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with Cabinet approval, has brought charges of police harassment from right-wing groups and allegations of torture from the suspects’ lawyers, and it is turning into a civil rights rather than a security matter.

Army Lt. Oren Edri, 23, arrested Sept. 2 on suspicion of obtaining arms for the radicals, told his attorney that he was beaten during his interrogation and was kept for three days in “a coffin-like cell” where rats bit him constantly.

“He is still being tortured,” said Edri’s father, Yitzhak, after meeting his son for 10 minutes in his prison cell. “They’re keeping toothpaste from him, they won’t let him pray, they’re keeping toilet paper from him, they won’t let him call home.”

Families of several other men complained that they were not notified of the arrests for two days, and attorneys for virtually all the suspects objected to military orders barring them under Israel’s tough security laws from meeting with their clients while they were being questioned.

Preliminary hearings in the cases have been heard behind closed doors, often without the presence of attorneys for the men.

“The recent arrests are a shame to the state of Israel,” said Uri Ariel, the head of the Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Israel’s emergency laws and the military orders in force in the West Bank permit the security police and army intelligence to make arrests without warrants, to hold detainees incommunicado for up to three weeks and to use “moderate physical pressure” in questioning them.

In the past, these powers have been used largely against Palestinians, and few Israelis have questioned the harsh practices, even torture, instead accepting government arguments that such measures were necessary to counter terrorist attacks.

But the Israeli public is growing angry at reports that the same tactics are being used against Israelis.

Follow Me, a right-wing group of reserve army officers, protested Edri’s detention in a cell measuring 3 feet by 4 and his interrogation, allegedly with a burlap sack over his head. “It is inconceivable that an Israeli army officer should receive the same treatment as Palestinian murderers,” the group said.

Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Meshulam Amit, a former commander of Israel’s border police, which is used primarily to quell Palestinian violence and enforce the occupation, said at a weekend demonstration that the General Security Service, known as Shin Bet, has to treat Jewish prisoners more gently than it does Arabs.

Despite denials from Shin Bet and police that Edri or the other detainees were tortured, state prosecutor Dorit Beinish ordered an investigation.

Saadia Kahalani, whose two sons are suspected of planning to attack Arabs, said: “Even if they had murdered an Arab, that wouldn’t justify all of this treatment. . . . They’re simply using terrorism against us.”