Palestinian teen slain on anniversary of revolt

Houston Chronicle News Services

Transcribed from the clipping

GAZA CITY, Occupied Gaza Strip — Israeli soldiers shot a teen-ager in the heart Thursday, and Palestinians held a general strike on the first anniversary of their uprising against Israel's 21-year occupation. The death of Yussef Mohammed Sbaith, 17, raised the number of Palestinians killed to at least 320 since the rebellion began Dec. 8, 1987, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Eleven Israelis have been slain and more than 7,000 Palestinians have been wounded. An army spokesman said Sbaith was shot in the heart when troops were stoned during a sweep of the West Bank village of Kafr Rai.

Soldiers also wounded a 22-year-old woman in the leg after meeting “violent resistance” from stone-throwing youths in the village, said the spokesman, whose name cannot be revealed under army rules. Army gunfire wounded 11 other Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy shot in the stomach, Arab doctors said.

The clashes occurred in the West Bank's largest city, Nablus, in the villages of Kabatiya and Beit Lid to the north and in Gaza City, they said. On the political front, meanwhile, Israel's left-leaning Labor Party voted by an overwhelming majority Thursday to re-enter negotiations with the hard-line Likud bloc on forming a joint national unity government.

The decision was a reversal of the party's 110-member Executive Bureau, which last week voted against further talks. The Israeli Civil Rights Association filed a complaint Thursday alleging that paramilitary border police severely beat six Palestinian women and sexually assaulted three of them in Gaza.

The women, including one who was nine months pregnant, filed affidavits together with medical reports showing a border police raid in Khan Younis refugee camp had left one with a broken arm, another with broken teeth and a third with a broken eardrum. Palestinians closed businesses and halted public transportation throughout the occupied territories.

The underground leadership, which the Palestine Liberation Organization supports, called the strike for the anniversary of the revolt in the occupied lands. Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East war.

Israeli military authorities clamped a curfew on the entire Gaza Strip, confining more than 650,000 Palestinians to their homes. The civil rights affidavits by members of the Abu Dakka family said that on Oct. 19, as they walked to work, they were attacked and chased into a house by border policemen who teamed up to hold them, beat them and molest three of them.

Tahani Abu Dakka, 28, testified that a soldier followed her into her house and blocked her against a wall with his body, putting his hand under her blouse in front of members of her family and neighbors, she said. Nabila Halil Abu Dakka, nine months pregnant, said she was beaten by several men with clubs and rifle butts.

Context added by this archive

The dead 17-year-old is named. The army spokesman who describes his death is not, because his name cannot be revealed under army rules. The dateline reads GAZA CITY, Occupied Gaza Strip.

Cite this item

"Palestinian teen slain on anniversary of revolt," Houston Chronicle, 9 December 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-070. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-070