Israel has been criticised for describing Friday's ambush in Jenin as "a massacre" after it transpired settlers were not targeted in the attack.
Matan Vilnai, an Israeli former general and leading member of the centre-left Israeli Labour party also added his voice saying it was a battle and "not a massacre."
Unarmed civilians were not among the dead in Friday night's attack on Israeli forces who had just escorted Jewish settlers home from Sabbath eve prayers, but the report of a massacre spread fast from the Foreign Ministry of Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Massacre" images have often figured in the inflamed rhetoric each side uses in a contest for world public opinion accompanying their conflict over territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and Palestinians want for a state.
"Those who adopted the Israeli version that those killed were Israeli civilians made a hasty decision," a senior aide to Yasser Arafat told journalists in Ramallah, where the Palestinian leader is confined to his compound by Israeli troops.
"This is legitimate resistance to occupation and there are hundreds of U.N. resolutions that guarantee the Palestinians the right to defend themselves," he said.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir said the Hebron "massacre" report came from accounts that the attack "happened as people were returning from synagogues, from prayers.
Asked if the ministry had erred on Hebron, Meir said, "That's hindsight. We had information we trusted that later was found to be wrong."
Binyamin Netanyahu, who replaced the Shimon Peres as foreign minister after Israel's ruling coalition fell last month, has been trying to build a case for expelling Arafat as the alleged mastermind of "terror."
On Friday night, Foreign Ministry spokesman Yoni Peled told reporters: "Jewish worshippers on their way to prayers were brutally attacked and murdered by Palestinian terrorists."
Other Israeli officials began referring to "a Sabbath massacre".
By late Saturday, it was clear that three gunmen had killed nine soldiers and border policemen and three armed settler security men who joined the battle after Jewish worshippers filed back into the fortified settlement of Kiryat Arba.