Gunmen killed an Israeli man in a shooting attack in the West Bank on Thursday as local attention was focused on Christmas celebrations in nearby Bethlehem.

A Palestinian group took responsibility for the killing.

The man, a resident of a Jewish settlement nearby, was in his 40s and was a father of seven, said Col. Avi Gil, the Israeli military commander in the area. Gil said the military had lifted restrictions on Palestinian movement in the area and that the perpetrators of the attack took advantage of that.

Shooting attacks were once commonplace on routes around the West Bank but have now become rare. Thursday's incident was one of only a handful to take place this year.

The Israeli military has kept many West Bank roads off-limits to Palestinian drivers in restrictions imposed after similar attacks against Israelis, but those restrictions have been gradually loosened and some checkpoints removed as violence in the West Bank has subsided.

A little-known Palestinian militant group identifying itself as a faction of President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement claimed responsibility for the attack in an e-mail sent to journalists.

The quiet in the West Bank in recent years has been due both to action by Israel's military against armed Palestinian groups and to the increasing control of security forces loyal to Abbas' Western-backed government.

The relative quiet allowed holiday celebrations to go ahead without incident Thursday in Bethlehem, where thousands of locals and visitors thronged the square outside Jesus' traditional birthplace.

Earlier in the day, about 200 Israeli teenagers soon to be drafted sent a letter to Israel's defense minister, saying they won't enforce any military orders to dismantle settlements in the West Bank because that violates Jewish law.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to slow construction in the West Bank has provoked anger in the largely religious settler community.

The teenagers, students at religious high schools, said their paramount loyalty is to Jewish religious law and not to that of the state. Several influential rabbis have urged religious soldiers to disobey any order to act against Jewish construction in the West Bank.

"The way the government is acting, the freeze in the West Bank, and the use of violence to implement it is very disrespectful toward the Bible," Hanani Lieberson, one of the teenagers who signed the letter, told Army Radio.

Although insubordination still is not a widespread phenomenon, it has the military worried. Eager to quash a potential rebellion, it has punished defiant soldiers, issued stern warnings to rabbis and expelled one seminary from a program that combines religious study and military service.