Palestinian Refugees Charge Israeli Troops Removing Villagers

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AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Palestinian refugees charged Saturday 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. … 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. “But when we tried to go back, they stopped us.

I managed to sneak through the hills to Imwas,” he said. “All the houses had been blown up, including mine. Only three were left standing which the Israelis used as observation posts.” He and his family walked part of the way to the Jordan River and rode the rest of the way to the Allenby Bridge in buses provided by the Israelis.

A woman from Qalqilye said some houses were damaged when the village was taken on the first day of the fighting. After the shooting stopped, the Israelis told everyone, “go, go, go away,” she said. She and her husband and children left the village with most of its stone houses still standing.

Later, she said, other inhabitants of Qalqilye joined her on her trek to the river and told her the village had been leveled. A refugee newly arrived from a hamlet six miles north of Hebron said the Israelis had earmarked about 15 villages for destruction by the time he and his family left.

“They suspected members of the Palestine Liberation Organization were living there,” the man said. He said the Israelis terrorized the villagers by firing through doors and windows at night and by looting.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 8x, column by column. The clipping carries no masthead, no folio and no page number, and the dateline is “AMMAN, Jordan (AP)” with no date, so the newspaper and the date of 25 June 1967 rest on the hand-typed slide label. The day is well supported by the page: the copy says the refugees made their charge on “Saturday”, and 24 June 1967 was a Saturday, which an Associated Press dispatch printing on Sunday 25 June fits exactly. The year is nowhere on the clipping. The label wrote the paper with a definite article and a city in parentheses, neither of which exists in this archive; the record follows the archive’s existing form of the name rather than forking a title on the strength of a hand-typed label, and the archive’s records under that name carry no city, so nothing on file either supports or contradicts the attribution. THE EXCERPT CARRIES ONE ELISION, marked …. Before the mark is the first column, contiguous; after it are the third and fourth columns, contiguous with each other. The second column — which covers the razing of Qalqilye and Imwas and an Israeli spokesman’s denial in Tel Aviv that Israeli forces evacuated Qalqilye or herded refugees across the Jordan — was read at page scale only and is NOT represented in the excerpt. “VIOLATING 1949 ARMISTICE” is a kicker set above the headline, not a deck; it puts the refugees’ charge into the paper’s own voice above a headline that attributes it to them. “Rammalah” with the doubled m is as printed.

Cite this clipping

"Palestinian Refugees Charge Israeli Troops Removing Villagers," Times Herald, 25 June 1967. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1967-052. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1967-052