The Messenger · 24 June 1967

CP-1967-022

Refugees Charge Deportation By Israelis

By Elias N. Antar, Associated Press, Amman, Jordan

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Transcribed from the clipping

“AMMAN, Jordan AP — Palestinian refugees charged today that Israeli troops occupying the Jordan River’s west bank are systematically deporting inhabitants of villages along the 1949 armistice line between Jordan and Israel.

Refugees, interviewed in their temporary quarters in an Amman school building, claimed villagers are being removed by force, intimidation and trickery. Several refugees said they were threatened with death if they tried to return to their homes.

They said at least two villages on the western edge of the Israeli-occupied west bank region have been leveled by Israeli demolition crews and bulldozers. Other villages were partly destroyed and some of their young men taken away by the Israeli troops, the refugees said.

They said the Israelis used ‘terror tactics’ to frighten the villagers, then forced them to leave in buses and on foot for the River Jordan marking the truce line. Thousands of these refugees have crossed into east Jordan since the cease-fire.

The villages affected are in an area from which the Israelis claimed Arab guerrillas staged raids into Israel before the six-day war.

The two villages which the refugees said had been razed were Qalqilye, an agricultural community of 12,000 about 30 miles northwest of Jerusalem, and Imwas, a village of 3,000 12 miles west of Jerusalem… An Israeli spokesman in Tel Aviv has denied charges that Israeli forces had evacuated Qalqilye and demolished the town.

He admitted the town was badly damaged, but said this resulted from the fighting. The spokesman also denied that Palestinian refugees were being herded across the Jordan River by Israeli soldiers. The refugees who were interviewed said they came from Qalqilye and Imwas and from the small village of Kafr Jammal north of Qalqilye.

Others said they came from Tulkarm, a town of 25,000 inhabitants 10 miles north of Qalqilye. A 75-year-old farmer and landowner from Imwas said the Israelis tricked him and his family into leaving the village by saying they were being taken to the nearby town of Rammalah for two hours.”

Context added by this archive

The verb is deporting, in the headline and in the first sentence, attributed to the people it happened to. The method is force, intimidation and trickery. Four villages are named with their populations. The Israeli denial runs to two paragraphs and is printed in full, and the last paragraph is a seventy-five-year-old man explaining how he was got out of his house.

Cite this clipping

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The same copy, in 1 other paper

• Exodus From Jordan River’s West BankWest Central Tribune24 June 1967CP-1967-023

Most of the shorter text appears in the longer one. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.