Israel considering sealing off areas for security reasons

Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem

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Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM — Top Israeli officials are weighing a proposal to seal off the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip this week as part of security precautions against demonstrations planned for Wednesday by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, a senior security source said Sunday.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the proposed ban would prevent residents on both sides of the so-called Green Line from crossing it. The invisible boundary divides the territory Israel held before 1967 from the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas that it occupied after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs live as Israeli citizens inside Israel and 1.4 million are either stateless or hold Jordanian citizenship in the territories. Israeli Arabs have declared a general strike for Wednesday as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian uprising that has rocked the West Bank and Gaza Strip for nearly 16 weeks.

The date, March 30, also commemorates protests in 1976 against Israeli land confiscations that left six Arabs dead. The self-styled Unified National Leadership for the Uprising in the Occupied Territories has also called for a general strike that day and for ‘huge demonstrations against the army and [Jewish] settlers.’

Fearing that the so-called ‘Land Day’ protests may lead to widespread violence, authorities are reportedly planning a long list of countermeasures. Israel Radio reported that Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Police Minister Chaim Bar-Lev briefed their fellow cabinet members on some of those measures during a regular meeting of the government Sunday.

The briefing was held in the framework of the Ministerial Defense Committee, whose deliberations were secret. It was not clear whether the proposal to seal the borders of the occupied territories was aired in the cabinet. However, the senior security source confirmed that ‘there is a proposal like that. It is one of the proposals. But nobody decided until now.’

The source added that a decision is expected by tonight. He added that it is not clear whether the ban would also exclude news coverage inside the occupied territories.

Meanwhile, Israel said its troops shot three Arabs in the West Bank village of Meithalun on Sunday after Palestinians attacked with iron bars and a car, but villagers accused the soldiers of firing at cars carrying wounded people.

Israeli soldiers killed a fourth Palestinian in the West Bank town of Salfit, while trying to rescue an Israeli tour bus that blundered into the Arab community. Sunday’s deaths raised to 118 the number of Palestinians killed in 15 weeks of violent protests against Israel’s 20-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to U.N. figures.

One Israeli soldier has been killed. Earlier this month, the authorities imposed a ban on travel by Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza Strip in hopes that it would impair coordination of anti-Israeli protest actions. Israel Radio reported Sunday that many Israeli Arabs have been detained or interrogated in the northern part of the country in the last two days.

Police sources denied the allegation and said that the only Israeli Arabs held were those who had been involved in illegal disturbances during the last three months, state radio added.”

Context added by this archive

The army’s account and the villagers’ are printed one after the other, and the paper does not choose between them. The running toll is the United Nations’: 118 Palestinians, one Israeli soldier.

Cite this clipping

"Israel considering sealing off areas for security reasons," Hartford Courant, 28 March 1988, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-010. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-010

This clipping is read closely in the section below

Security reasons, and what they were given for