Terror Still Stalks Residents Of Gaza Strip As Political Murders Increase In Number

By Jeanne Kuebler, Copley News Service, Jebeliye Refugee Camp, Occupied Gaza Strip

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“JEBELIYE REFUGEE CAMP, Occupied Gaza Strip — The young boys crowded around the truck loaded with watermelons, dickering with the seller over the price and blocking all other traffic along the main street… At night few residents venture outside their homes.

The only ones on the streets — other than armed Arab terrorists — are occasional Israeli vehicular patrols… Even within the camp’s mud shacks, many refugees are not safe. Almost 70 murders were committed in Gaza in the first six months of 1971, about half of them in Jebeliye.

The terrorists themselves are not immune to the nightly violence… The murders are not all that unusual, spokesmen for the military government in Gaza insist. Murders are often the outcome of family feuds or a way to avenge the besmirched honor of a wife, daughter or sister.

But the pace of the killings has risen sharply… ‘We see these killings as primarily for political reasons,’ one long-term Gazan said. ‘The man is murdered because he is working for the Jews either publicly or secretly and the woman because she refuses to tell the fadayi (guerrillas) where the man is.’

Murder isn’t the only form of guerrilla activity in Gaza, ‘home’ to some 360,000 people, 220,000 of them classified as refugees by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and 163,000 in camps—50,000 in Jebeliye alone.

Attacks on Israeli soldiers and the ‘collaborating’ population — such as the 12,000 Gazans who travel each day to Israel to work—also take their toll. Through mid-June authorities recorded nearly 200 incidents — a grenade tossed into a bus loaded with Arab workers or at an Israeli soldier stationed at an intersection.

In those daily incidents 37 were killed — six Israelis and 31 Arabs — and well over 300 injured, 80 per cent of them Arabs… Israeli spokesmen admit security forces have never made house-to-house weapons searches in all of Gaza town and the refugee camps.

‘We don’t want to disturb normal life too much,’ one officer said… The Israeli buses that make daily runs to Gaza from Ashkelon and Beersheba have heavy wire mesh over their windows to ward off grenades.

Barbed wire has created one-way streets in areas where incidents are common, blocking escape paths… Israeli spokesmen insist little can be done about the frequent murders and that, as Defense Minister Moshe Dayan recently told reporters, the security situation is ‘satisfactory.’”

Context added by this archive

Gaza in 1971, sixteen years before the intifada and seventeen before Hamas. The dateline reads Occupied Gaza Strip. The dead are counted by side — six Israelis and 31 Arabs — and 80% of the injured are Arabs. A map runs beside it with Gaza in Arabic and Hebrew at the top.

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"Terror Still Stalks Residents Of Gaza Strip As Political Murders Increase In Number," The Sun, 1 August 1971, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1971-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1971-003