The New York Times · New York, New York · 22 December 1987

CP-1987-049

A GENERAL STRIKE BY ISRAEL’S ARABS DISRUPTS COUNTRY

Protest Spills Out of West Bank and Gaza — Three More Palestinians Killed

By JOHN KIFNER

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM, Dec. 21 — Hundreds of thousands of Arabs inside Israel joined others in the occupied territories today in a general strike protesting Israel’s handling of a wave of protests. At least three Palestinian protesters who reportedly threw firebombs were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers on the West Bank.

Another Palestinian died of his wounds in a Gaza hospital today, raising the confirmed death toll to at least 20 in 13 days of clashes in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

A senior commander said tonight that the Israeli Army would send more troops into the West Bank on Tuesday, prepared to take “tougher measures” because the “restraint shown in the last two weeks has apparently been interpreted as weakness.”

Arab Laborers Stay Home Arab towns and villages in northern Galilee and other parts of pre-1967 Israel were closed down, every shop shuttered, as were those in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. More important, the great numbers of Arab laborers who wait on tables, pick vegetables, haul garbage, lay brick and perform most of Israel’s menial work stayed home.

More than 100,000 workers from the occupied territories go into Israel each day, in addition to the Arabs living there, filling a vital role in the Israeli economy. The protests in the West Bank of the Jordan River and the Gaza Strip, both under Israeli occupation since the 1967 war, reflect the growing frustrations of the long occupation.

Traffic Accident Rumors But the immediate cause was a traffic accident this month in which four Gaza workers died. Rumors spread that the collision of an Arab vehicle with a truck driven by an Israeli was a reprisal for the fatal stabbing of an Israeli in a Gaza market the week before.

Today, as the unrest spread from the occupied territories to Israel itself, it appeared to unite Arabs who are citizens of Israel with those who consider themselves stateless Palestinians.

“This is unprecedented in that it’s the first time the Israeli Arabs are following the Arabs in the territories,” said Yehuda Litani, an Arab-affairs specialist at The Jerusalem Post. “We’ve had clashes today in places where there have never been — Jaffa, Abu Ghosh. These places are very quiet.

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 survives, but the locator map at the foot of the page is credited “The New York Times/Dec. 22, 1987” — which confirms both `date` (1987-12-22) and `pub`. The byline block also carries “Special to The New York Times”, and the dateline reads “JERUSALEM, Dec. 21”, the day before.

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