The New York Times · New York, New York · 13 January 1981

CP-1981-024

Bedouin Member of the Israeli Parliament Is Shot to Death in Jerusalem

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM, Jan. 3 — A Bedouin Member of Parliament, Hammad Abu Rabia, was shot to death in Jerusalem tonight by gunfire from a jeep. Police roadblocks were immediately set up throughout the city and on the highways to Tel Aviv and the Dead Sea, but no arrests were reported in the killing, the first assassination of a member of Israel’s Parliament.

Israeli television initially reported that the shots had been fired from a military vehicle. However, a police spokesman at the scene, near the Holy Land Hotel, said the jeep was “apparently military, but it could have been civilian, too.” Israeli radio later quoted the police as contending that it was a civilian jeep.

The lone witness was a worker at the hotel, the police said. Mr. Abu Rabia, who was in his early 50’s, was the chief of one of the largest Bedouin tribes in the Negev. He had struggled for a compromise with the Government over its efforts to expropriate Bedouin desert land for a new air base, and he had voted against the expropriation bill in the Parliament.

Many Bedouins were reportedly dissatisfied with his performance as a negotiator, contending that he did not resist the Government strongly enough. One line of speculation about his murder tonight held that the perpetrator had come from among the Bedouins.

Another theory, put forth by some who knew him well, was that he had been murdered by Druses — members of an Arab religious sect — because of a dispute over his seat in Parliament.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead or page date line is present on this clipping — it is trimmed to the headline, three text columns and the portrait. The only internal date is the dateline, which reads “JERUSALEM, Jan. 3”. The byline block reads only “Special to The New York Times”, which is consistent with `pub`.

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