Refugees Charge Deportation By Israelis

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

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 item

"Refugees Charge Deportation By Israelis," The Messenger, 24 June 1967. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1967-022. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1967-022

Elsewhere in the archive

Exodus From Jordan River’s West BankWest Central Tribune · 24 June 1967 · the same dispatch, carried by another paper
A Solution for Palestinians?Toronto Star · 7 June 1967 · the same year
Refugee Crisis Forming On Jordan’s West BankCourier-Journal · 13 June 1967 · the same year
The Endlessly Embattled Land Of PalestineCalgary Herald · 14 June 1967 · the same year

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1967-022.

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