HEBRON, West Bank, April 1 — Six days after a 10-month-old girl was killed by Palestinian fire, her tiny body, shrouded in blue velvet, was escorted through this tense, divided city to a heavily guarded burial punctuated by hoarse, sobbing prayers and cries for revenge.

In less than a week, the baby, Shalhevet Pass, has become a potent Israeli symbol as an innocent victim of the raging violence. A photograph of her cherubic face was circulated around the world not only by Jewish militants but also by Israeli diplomats, who were instructed to conduct a publicity campaign focused on the "unprecedented cruelty" of her killing.

Although religious Jews bury their dead immediately, the Pass family, which is part of the militant settler movement in Hebron, demanded that Israel first reconquer the Palestinian neighborhood above their enclave from which the shot that killed Shalhevet was fired. The government declined to do so, and after entreaties from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the family proceeded with the funeral today.

Hebron, where about 400 Israeli settlers live in heavily fortified enclaves in a large, predominantly Palestinian city, is volatile even during peaceful times. It is a center of both Jewish and Muslim militancy. Since the violence erupted six months ago, however, Hebron has been a powder keg. And the baby's death has made it particularly explosive and central to the conflict as well as a potentially destabilizing challenge for Mr. Sharon.

Throngs of Israelis, most of them religious settlers, marched wearing laminated pictures of Shalhevet Pass and stickers that said, "No more Arabs, no more terror." From the tomb of the biblical patriarchs to the graveyard, they wound past tanks, sandbags and Palestinian homes that were shuttered because of a daylong Israeli-imposed curfew. The faces of small children peeked out at them from behind floral curtains.

Mourners trailed behind Shalhevet, a wrapped bundle that was carried by relatives, including one man who rocked her as if she were alive. Her father, Yitzhak Pass, who was wounded by the bullet that passed through his daughter's head, traveled in a wheelchair. Her mother, Uriya, dressed in a long Indian print skirt and a blue head scarf, looked as young as the weeping religious high school students beside her. But her red-ringed eyes were dry, and she seemed stunned and lost.

"Looking at your picture, our heart shrinks," a relative, Ilana Zarbiv, cried out to the baby. "Your blood demands to be avenged. In our hearts, we'll never forget you, and we'll never forgive."

Schoolgirls embraced, forehead to forehead, under gnarled olive trees. Men swayed in prayer, asking for God's mercy and intercession as a rabbi's voice hiccuped with grief over a loudspeaker. Women buried their faces in the canopies of their own babies' strollers. One held a framed photograph of Shalhevet in her Purim costume, in the style of the Palestinian mothers who grieve for their martyred sons.

An 11-year-old Palestinian boy, Muhammad Tamini, was buried today in a small quiet funeral in his village near Ramallah. The boy died of wounds sustained in clashes with Israeli troops two weeks ago.

Israeli special forces today arrested six members of the elite personal security forces of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, in what Palestinian officials condemned as an abduction and an escalation of the conflict.

Many Israelis have long considered the Hebron settlers to be extremists, living in a world apart. But they rallied behind the community after Shalhevet was killed; newspaper headlines referred to the killing of an Israeli baby and not a "settler baby." Shalhevet was mourned nationally. But many Israelis considered it distasteful when her funeral was delayed for political reasons, and their empathy began to cool.

Only one senior Israeli official, Eli Suissa, a cabinet minister from the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, was seen at the funeral. Mr. Sharon did not come. It is likely that he was advised not to because it was dangerous.

The settlers, joined by right-wing politicians, are pressing Mr. Sharon to respond to violence more forcefully. They wore T-shirts saying, "Restraint is killing us," and expressed intense frustration at Mr. Sharon, who was elected partly because of his iron-fisted image.

Standing in the weedy graveyard, Zvi Katzover, who is the council leader for a neighboring settlement, Qiryat Arba, declared, "It's time for war."

"Prime Minister Sharon, don't you know how long we've waited for your government?" he continued, beneath a broiling sun, the minaret of a mosque and a phalanx of cameras and troops. "We've been waiting exactly for what you know how to do: win a war. You've never lost a war, and you won't lose this one. But you have to attack! You have to send your troops into Palestinian-controlled areas."

Along the procession's route, some settlers threw stones at the windows of Palestinian homes. At one point, settler and Palestinian youths exchanged stones despite an Israeli tank positioned between them. After the funeral, some settlers jumped a wall into a Muslim cemetery and others tried to push up a hill to occupy the Palestinian neighborhood, Abu Sneina, from which the fatal shot was fired.

But Israeli soldiers restrained them, and the settlers taunted the soldiers, shouting, "It's the Jews you hold back!" and "Shoot us, go ahead and shoot us!"

Over the weekend, Benjamin Ben- Eliezer, the defense minister, threatened to pull Israeli troops out of Hebron if the settlers did not respect the forces who were stationed there to protect them. He then retracted his warning, but Ephraim Sneh, the transportation minister and former deputy defense minister, echoed his frustration today.

"The Israeli Defense Forces and the border police expend extraordinary efforts to defend the Jewish community of Hebron, which numbers some 400 souls," Mr. Sneh told the Israel radio. "But the attitude of the Hebron settlers, certainly of the extremists among them, is hostile. They view the I.D.F. as a tool to carry out their objective, which is, in the end, to seize control of Palestinian Hebron."

In midafternoon, as the crowd was dispersing, a shot rang out that Israeli troops believed to be from the Palestinian side. They responded with a barrage of fire at Abu Sneina, the hilltop Palestinian neighborhood that the settlers want to seize. Later, army officials said they were examining the possibility that the shot was misfired by one of the mourners, some of whom wore rifles slung over their shoulders.

Abu Sneina has been heavily shelled by the Israelis this week, and many residents have fled to relatives' homes. There have been intense gun battles between Palestinian gunmen stationed there and Israeli troops below.

Yitzhak Levy, leader of the National Religious Party, urged Mr. Sharon to make a "courageous decision" about the fate of Hebron. He suggested that Mr. Sharon either retake Abu Sneina and other surrounding hills — or evacuate the Jewish community.

"I say this with great sadness because we've reached the decisive moment," Mr. Levy said. "This decision cannot simply be skipped over. You cannot leave Jews under a daily salvo of fire, with bullets penetrating their homes."