JERUSALEM—Under a withering early spring sunshine, thousands gathered Wednesday to bury the victims of a cold-blooded attack on a French school, as police were locked in a standoff with the suspected killer two thousand miles away in Toulouse.

The speaker of the Israeli parliament, Reuven Rivlin, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, Israel´s two chief rabbis, and members of Israel´s French community spoke at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem, with eulogies alternating between French and Hebrew.

Choking back tears, Avishai Monsonego made "one last request"´ of his younger sister Myriam, the eight-year old girl who was hunted down and killed on Monday in the yard of the Ozar Hatorah private school in Toulouse, where her father is the director. Mr. Monsonego implored his sister to pray for their parents to have the strength to go on.

Rabbi Jonathan Sandler was also killed, along with his two young sons Gabriel and Arye, in an attack by a lone gunman on a scooter. Prosecutors said all of the victims were shot at point-blank range in a brutal onslaught by a merciless killer.

Mr Juppé called the attack a national tragedy and vowed to ensure that it wouldn´t happen again. He said the perpetrators would be arrested and brought to trial. "Don´t doubt our determination to fight anti-Semitism," Mr Juppé said. He added that all of France is being targeted when Jews are attacked.

Israeli President Shimon Peres met with Mr. Juppé ahead of the funeral and said his visit underscored the deep relations between the two countries.

"The expression of all the French people and President Sarkozy was for us a moving voice, very dear, very important," said Mr. Peres after the meeting. "For us as a Jewish state, for us as Israel, a state that is still under threat, and especially because children are the dearest thing we have. Terror is the biggest threat we face."

Mr. Rivlin, the Israeli speaker, compared the shootings to "evil" terrorist strikes against Jewish targets in Mumbai in 2008, in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s and in the West Bank settlement of Itamar last year. "This is evil, the hate of Israel for its own sake," he said. "We won´t let them defeat us."

Police have been stuck in a standoff for hours with a 24-year old Frenchman Wednesday, who is holed up in a Toulouse apartment building. France´s Interior Minister Claude Guéant said the man has told police he attacked the Jewish school to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children.

While waiting for the funeral to begin, mourners listened on mobile phones to French radio reports about the siege in Toulouse and to interviews with presidential candidates.

The school shootings, which followed two separate but linked attacks on soldiers that left three dead in the southwest of the country, have stunned the French public and interrupted France´s presidential election campaign. (Copyright © Dow Jones & Company, Inc.) 03/21/12)