Pueblo Star-Journal and Sunday Chieftain · 29 April 1956

CP-1956-011

Palestinian Arabs Talking Of Mass March On Israel

The Associated Press, Gaza

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Transcribed from the clipping

“GAZA (on the Egyptian-Israeli Frontier) (P)—More than 250,000 Palestinian Arab refugees were reported Saturday to be threatening to stage a mass march on Israel. U. N. relief agency officials said reports of the march were circulating through the overcrowded refugee camps in the Egyptian-held Gaza strip.

The officials said there were increasing indications that the patience of the poverty-stricken Arab refugees with the United Nations’ eight-year efforts to solve their problems were wearing thin. They said such a march along the 27-mile long border would be almost impossible to stop. ‘If they decide to march,’ one U. N. official said, ‘Who can stop them?

You can’t shoot a quarter of a million people.’ Despite their exile, the refugees maintain a fanatical determination to return to their ancestral homes and farmlands in what is now Israel. School children salute the Palestine flag every morning and chant: ‘We salute you Palestine.’ Lt. Col.

Mahmoud El Massri, chief Egyptian medical officer in the strip, described the refugees as ‘multi-injured’ people. He said they suffer dangerous psychoses and neuroses as well as physical ailments.

The situation could easily lead to such desperation measures as the mass march on Israel, he said… They said reports circulating through the camps since February predicted the refugees would return to their homes by June 1. The basis for the rumors could not be pinned down, they said, but were believed by a large number of the refugees.

Some 215,000 Arabs who fled Palestine during the Arab-Israel War are concentrated in eight camps in the Gaza strip. Others live in poverty in towns and villages on nine cents of food daily. Most are jobless.”

Context added by this archive

Printed above an item about an industrial research report at a chamber of commerce luncheon. The page is dated on the clipping: Page 6A, Sunday, April 29, 1956.

Cite this clipping

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