Israelis Raid Palestine University

United Press International

Transcribed from the clipping

TEL AVIV, Israel (UPI) — Israeli soldiers raided the largest Palestinian university in the occupied West Bank, breaking up a show that featured handbooks on guerrilla warfare and bomb-making, Israeli authorities said today. The east Jerusalem-based Palestine Press Service said 10 people were arrested late yesterday at An-Najah University in Nablus.

It said the Israelis stormed into an exhibit of Palestinian folklore. “Security forces accompanied by a respresentative of the university administration entered An-Najah ... after having discovered that a hostile exhibit, including nationalistic and provocative displays, was taking place there,” a spokesman for Israeli occupation authorities said.

The spokesman made no mention of any arrests. “Slogans supporting both the Palestine Liberation Organization and terrorist acts perpetrated by the organization in Israel were prominently displayed at the exhibit,” he said, “along with instruction booklets on conducting guerrilla warfare, on producing makeshift explosive devices and on weapons use.”

The spokesman said troops also searched the offices of a pro-PLO student organization on campus, uncovering “knives, chains, an ax, brass knuckles, a plastic M-16 rifle and a wooden model of Kalashnikov submachine gun.” Security forces, he said, confiscated “a great deal of material from the exhibit and this organization’s offices.”

A man answering the university’s telephone said “everything is closed” and no one was available for comment. About 3,000 Palestinians study at An-Najah, the largest of the West Bank’s four four-year institutions of higher learning. Israeli authorities shut down the university from June 5, 1983, to Sept.

1, 1983, after students held a demonstration to commemorate the first anniversary of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Context added by this archive

Two descriptions of the same room, printed one after the other. The Palestine Press Service says an exhibit of Palestinian folklore. The occupation authorities say a hostile exhibit with nationalistic and provocative displays. The weapons listed in the confiscation include a plastic rifle and a wooden model.

Four years later the news agency that supplied the first description would itself be closed for six months.

Cite this item

"Israelis Raid Palestine University," The Indianapolis News, 30 July 1984. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1984-005. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1984-005