Israeli riot police fired tear gas and stun grenades at Jewish settlers occupying a building in the centre of the West Bank town of Hebron, detaining 15 extremists as the Government vowed to evict them.

Amid reports that Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, was negotiating a last-minute compromise, settlers swore to fight on “until the last man”, as they laid plans for further violent actions in the West Bank.

The Government had dispatched 300 riot police to confront the young settlers, who hurled stones and debris at both the Palestinians who surround them and the Israeli soldiers guarding the four-storey structure the settlers have named the “House of Peace”.

Black stars of David daubed on Muslim gravestones nearby, the smashed windows of a Palestinian home and a wall tagged with a spray-painted Hebrew word “revenge” were evidence of the dangerously escalating violence

Amid the battle, the teenagers prayed, played guitars and wandered out aimlessly when they were not pelting soldiers and Palestinians with stones and paint-filled balloons.

With no peaceful resolution in sight, Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister announced that the Hebron squatters would soon be forced out of the building. “It will be evacuated,” Mr Olmert said. “I will not allow anyone to challenge Israeli democracy.”

The settlers, resigned to a violent conclusion to the Hebron stand-off, have promised to take their battle to another town administered by the Palestinian Authority.

Yonatan Rachamin, 25, has spent much of the past three years moving from one disputed Jewish expansion to another. Beginning in Gush Katif, the Jewish settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip which was evacuated in the summer of 2005, Mr Rachamin has fought evacuation orders on four sites. In each case, he said, he learned he must fight harder and more aggressively.

The new “price tag” policy adopted by settlers nearly four months ago reflects the settlers’ changing tactics. For each structure or outpost that the Government attempts to evacuate, settlers retaliate with attacks on local Palestinians or occupations elsewhere in the West Bank.

“We have learned not to go peacefully. They can make decisions wherever they want, the foreign leaders in Washington, London, Tokyo, but they have us to deal with and we’re not leaving,” Mr Rachamin said.

He added that he had little regard for the efforts of Tony Blair, the Middle East Envoy, or Gordon Brown, saying that their peace initiatives “looked good on paper but would be impossible to carry out”.

Almost half a million Israelis live in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, areas captured by Israel in the 1967 War and sought by the Palestinians for their future state, along with Gaza. The international community views the settlements as illegal, and has chastised Israel for not moving to dismantle them.

Alhough Mr Olmert has acknowledged that Israel must return to “roughly the ’67 borders”, there has been more settlement expansion while he has been in office than in previous years.

Mr Rachamin insists that the settlers feel astrong enough to take on the might of the Israel Defence forces (IDF). “We need to make sure the IDF thinks twice before attempting to evacuate settlers ... We have broadened the fight, and we respond by attacking all over. The IDF won’t determine where the fight is, we will choose the battlefield.”

“There will be more actions like this,” he promises. “We are small groups and can move quickly while the army is huge and burdensome. We are planning to spread them thin, and make them fight for every inch. We won’t be leaving quietly... hopefully at all.”

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