U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran and Syria on Wednesday of deliberately stoking Muslim anger in a dispute over caricatures satirizing Islam's Prophet Mohammad that has sparked deadly protests.
President George W. Bush said governments should stop the violence that has erupted over the cartoons, including attacks on Western diplomatic missions in parts of the Muslim world. At least 10 people have been killed in protests in Afghanistan alone.
"Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes and the world ought to call them on it," Rice said at a joint news conference with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
She said nothing justified the violence that had resulted worldwide from the cartoons and appealed to governments to urge calm.
"There are governments that have used this opportunity to incite violence," she added, referring to Syria and Iran.
Earlier Wednesday, the international monitoring team in Hebron said it was temporarily leaving the West Bank city after angry Palestinians attacked their office in retaliation for the publication in many European countries of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad.
Hundreds of Palestinians attacked a building belonging to the Temporary Internation Presence in Hebron, throwing stones and smashing windows as dozens of foreigners were trapped inside - the most violent West Bank protest yet against Danish caricatures seen as insulting to Islam.
At one point, rioters forced open a door of the building and entered, and the unarmed observers waved clubs in an attempt to drive them off. Palestinian police, initially outnumbered, eventually pushed back the crowd, and the foreigners began leaving the city.
Sixty members of the mission were inside at the time, said Gunhild Forselv, a spokeswoman for TIPH, which serves as a buffer between the city's 500 Jewish residents and 170,000 Palestinians.
"Denmark out of Hebron," and "We will redeem our prophet," the crowd chanted.
The TIPH, which was formed following the signing of the 1997 Hebron agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, will set up its temporary offices in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the group said.
Eleven Danish members of TIPH left more than a week ago after protests against the Danish cartoons began sweeping across the Muslim world, Forselv said.
The protesters, most of them youths, chased away outnumbered Palestinian police who were stationed outside the mission more than a week ago because of the unrest, Forselv said. But reinforcements were called in, and police took up positions again, she said.
Caricatures first published in Denmark, then reprinted in various European newspapers, show the Prophet Mohammed - itself an offense because Islamic tradition bars the depiction of the faith's founder. Fanning the flames was one cartoon showing Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban.
The offending cartoons have touched off protests in the Middle East, Muslim countries in Southeast Asia and Europe, with some demonstrators burning Danish and Norwegian flags, issuing death calls and others demanding a boycott of Danish and European goods.
Two people were killed and 10 others wounded in a riot that erupted during a protest of the cartoon in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday. Police shot and used batons to beat stone-throwing protesters outside the Danish diplomatic mission office in Afghanistan, as well as in another riot near the offices of the World Bank.
