Israeli troops storm Arab-hijacked bus

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EDITOR'S NOTE — The following story was submitted to the Israeli military censor, who ordered significant material deleted. ISRAELI-OCCUPIED GAZA STRIP (AP) — Arab guerrillas hijacked a bus carrying more than 30 Israelis and sped toward the Egyptian border, but Israeli troops stopped it short of the frontier and stormed aboard early Friday, a military spokesman reported.

“There was a storming and I cannot tell you as yet who is alive and who is dead,” the spokesman said in Tel Aviv. Other sources said two hijackers were killed. Sources and witnesses reported that Israeli soldiers shot out the tires of the bus and punctured the fuel tank, then surrounded the immobilized vehicle.

They said several people were wounded and others were held hostage on the bus by three or four armed guerrillas. The hijackers seized the bus at about 7:30 p.m. after it had left Ashdod on its run from Tel Aviv to the Mediterranean port of Ashkelon.

Fire from the troops stopped the bus, which seats 42 people and left Tel Aviv nearly full, near the Palestinian refugee camp of Dir el Balah, 10 miles north of the Egyptian border, Israeli sources said. Some passengers fled through an open door when the bus was halted, the sources said, and two others — including a pregnant woman — were freed later.

Israeli reporters on the scene and other reliable sources said the bus was parked on a side road near the Dir el Balah camp, between Rafah and Gaza City, about 50 miles south of Tel Aviv. Military sources said the Arabs apparently boarded the bus as paying passengers, then pulled weapons and forced the driver to take it to the border.

The British Broadcasting Corp. said 41 people were aboard when the hijackers took over. It said seven passengers escaped when the bus was stopped and surrounded by Israeli troops, but five of them were wounded. NBC radio said the hijackers then demanded the release of 500 prisoners held in Israeli jails and free passage to Egypt for themselves.

Israeli soldiers and border police patrolled the roads and set up numerous roadblocks in the Gaza Strip, which Israel captured from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East war.

Meir Naim, who works in a restaurant in a gas station 12 miles north of Ashkelon, said a young woman came in trembling between 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m., said she had been on the bus from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon and got off because “four suspicious-looking Arabs got on.” He said a man came in soon after and told a similar story.

Naim said he then reported to police that something might be wrong. The Israeli military censor blacked out coverage of the hijacking for several hours, but rumors of it spread nonetheless. On April 2, three Palestinian guerrillas threw grenades and fired automatic weapons at random on Jerusalem's main street, wounding 48 people.

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Masthead not readable on the scan. The label on the slide read: [no masthead on clipping] — A two-column clipping, read at 7x-8x. The whole article is transcribed. The bottom of an unrelated preceding story is visible along the top edge and the top of a following headline along the bottom edge; neither is transcribed. No masthead, date line or page number. SEE THE LABEL PROBLEM NOTED ON THE OTHER CLIPPING FROM THIS SLIDE: these two are transposed in Maria's label and this is the April 13 1984 item.

Cite this clipping

"Israeli troops storm Arab-hijacked bus," (newspaper unidentified), 13 April 1984. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1984-049. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1984-049