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Beaumont Journal · 29 July 1971

CP-1971-004

Terror Stalks Gaza

Copley News Service, Jebeliye Refugee Camp, Occupied Gaza Strip

Terror Stalks Gaza — Beaumont Journal, 29 July 1971
Beaumont Journal · 29 July 1971

Transcribed from the clipping

“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 of Jebeliye’s market. Groups of men sat in open-air cafes over long-finished glasses of coffee, shielded from the sun by corrugated tin roofs held in place by large stones. Others shopped, along with a handful of women dressed in the traditional peasant garb of Palestine. The otherwise peaceful scene was briefly interrupted by three armed Israeli soldiers walking slowly down a side road, Uzi submachine guns ready for use. The youths walked several yards apart—protection if a grenade is tossed—and one of them turned to give a warning stare at a group of boys when a pebble was thrown. Then the soldiers walked on, and the men in the cafes resumed their talk, the women their investigations of fruits and vegetables. But when dusk comes, the scene is far different… Even within the camps’ 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. Some are committed with automatic weapons, others with knives. Often women are beaten to death—perhaps because their husbands ‘collaborated’ with the Israelis, perhaps during an attempted rape… And though many Arabs acknowledge that some of the murders are personally motivated, few are willing to accept the Israeli verdict that most of them are unconnected with politics.”

Context added by this archive

The same Copley dispatch the Jonesboro Sun ran three days later, under a different headline. This version opens on boys buying watermelons and keeps the paragraph about women beaten to death, and the sentence saying few Arabs accept the Israeli explanation.

Cite this item

"Terror Stalks Gaza," Beaumont Journal, 29 July 1971. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1971-004. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1971-004

Elsewhere in the archive

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-1971-004.

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