Undaunted Palestinians resume violence

The Associated Press

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“…authorities seem to be encountering is that many Palestinian youths are not afraid of any Israeli threats. Arab residents of the occupied territories are not permitted to possess firearms.

The military high command confirmed that one Palestinian had been shot and killed and seven others wounded when Israeli soldiers shot at protesters throwing stones at an Israeli patrol in the Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis. U.N. officials in Gaza City said at least 12 people had been wounded in the incident.

The Palestine Press Service, an East Jerusalem news agency that closely monitors events in the occupied territories, placed the number of those killed in the Khan Younis disturbance at two.

Military officials said they feared that the Khan Younis demonstration, in which scores of Palestinian youths hurled stones at a small Israeli squad patrolling the town, signaled the start of a second wave of violence after the deployment of about 12,000 additional troops, the arrests of 1,200 protesters and deportation orders against nine alleged inciters.

The United States has warned that the expulsions violate international law and would incite further protests in the territories. [In Cairo, Egypt, riot police used batons and tear gas to disperse hundreds of Egyptian students demonstrating Tuesday against Israel’s crackdown on Palestinians, The Associated Press reported.] The Arab mood in the territories appeared to turn from exhaustion to rage Sunday when an Israeli soldier, hit by a stone during a protest in the West Bank village of El Ram, five miles north of Jerusalem, chased a 14-year-old boy into a house and started shooting, killing a 25-year-old woman as she hung laundry in her courtyard.

The killing triggered protests throughout the West Bank and Gaza Monday that troops quelled with rubber bullets and tear gas… Under a curfew order, military authorities forbade the 11,000 residents of the Tulkarem refugee camp from leaving their houses Tuesday until further notice.

Throughout the occupied territories, where a partial commercial strike has been in effect for more than two weeks, Israeli soldiers forced merchants to open their shops by threatening to weld their shutters closed if they refused… ‘One morning, a person wakes up and discovers that he is out of punishments,’ wrote the respected Haaretz newspaper columnist Yoel Marcus.

‘This could happen in any household when a parent discovers that his severe punishments have stopped working and his children are no longer afraid. This is a moment of terrible crisis for the parent, when he discovers he has lost his authority. This is more or less the situation of the state in terms of its relationship with the territories.

For the young Palestinians there, being sent to jail carries the same prestige as an Israeli being sent to an elite army unit.’ Palestinian analysts said the defiance of Arab youth in the territories also had stripped the older generation of Palestinians of their authority, with sons rejecting the more moderate views of their fathers.

On Tuesday, a group of prominent East Jerusalem Palestinians said they would call on the 1.4 million residents of the territories to begin a non-violent campaign of civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation.

The campaign will include refusal to pay taxes to Israeli occupation authorities, a boycott of Israeli products and the wearing of black as a sign of mourning for those killed in the rioting, said Hanna Siniora, the editor of the East Jerusalem daily Al Fajr.”

Context added by this archive

Three different counts of the dead at Khan Younis in one column — the military high command’s, the U.N.’s, and the Palestine Press Service’s. A 25-year-old woman is killed hanging laundry and is not named. The story is a jump from page 1A.

Cite this clipping

"Undaunted Palestinians resume violence," The News & Observer, 6 January 1988, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-006. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-006