HEBRON, West Bank ? Leora Rodrig held her daughter in her arms and welcomed a group of American visitors Tuesday into her new home: a steel shipping container, set up at the site where 12 members of Israeli security forces were killed in a gunbattle with Palestinian militants.

“I wish there was something more in the kitchen for me to offer you,” the 23-year-old Israeli said. She swung open the container’s doors to reveal the metal interior, furnished with a mattress for herself and her husband, a wicker settee and a crib for their 5 1/2-month-old daughter.

Rodrig’s is one of three Jewish settler families who quickly moved to set up camp in a dusty clearing alongside a road into Hebron where Islamic Jihad militants ambushed Israeli soldiers and guards Friday night.

Their encampment is symbolic – the families still have homes in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, just up the hill – but they and their supporters hope it will be the nucleus for a dramatic expansion of Jewish settlements in Hebron, a project that could lead to Palestinian residents being forced from their homes.

Riding on Israeli anger over the attack, the settlers are pressing the government to give permission for a new stretch of settlement linking Kiryat Arba – home to several thousand people on the edge of Hebron – to tiny settler enclaves in the city center about a half-mile away, where about 400 Israelis live.

The new outpost, which has not been approved by the government, was established in a manner reminiscent of the earliest settlement efforts after Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 war, when Jews determined to lay a claim to the biblical territory established what they called “facts on the ground.”

The settlers in Hebron are considered among the most radical; they are opposed by many fellow Israeli Jews who favor withdrawing from the West Bank.

Many of the settlers have tangled not only with Palestinians but also with Israeli soldiers and police.

Today, with soldiers milling around and protecting the new outpost, some here said that they feel that time is on their side.

“If you come here in three years, you will see this neighborhood connected to historic Hebron. This is a historic moment,” said Eli Cohen, a visiting Likud member of Parliament.

Hebron is home to about 130,000 Palestinians, and thousands of Palestinians live in neighborhoods along the path of the envisaged expansion.

A newly raised Israeli flag waves over a formerly vacant lot that is now the location of a makeshift Israeli settlement expansion outpost, next to the site where Palestinian gunmen ambushed Israeli troops Friday in the West Bank town of Hebron. Jewish settlers have vowed to expand existing settlements onto Palestinian territory.

As supporters of the settlers flocked to the encampment Tuesday, Palestinians watched from the barred windows of their homes only yards away, where they have been confined by a curfew since the attack.

In the house closest to the site, Soheila Mahmoud Jaber said that her family had already come under pressure to leave.

Monday night, a group of settlers attacked the house, breaking windows before soldiers ran them off. Her neighbor, Thawra Jaber, reported a similar attack.

“We’re sitting here in fear and terror,” said Soheila Jaber, a 45-year-old mother of five. “Our fear is not of the soldiers, it’s of the settlers. They don’t want any Arabs here.”

Friday’s ambush began when gunmen opened fire on the road leading to Kiryat Arba as Jewish worshippers passed, returning from the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a site holy to Jews and Muslims.

The gunmen lured Israeli soldiers and guards into an alley, trapping them with withering fire. Most of the 12 deaths occurred in the alley. No worshippers were hurt.