The New York Times · 23 January 1988

CP-1988-110

Arabs Recount Severe Beatings By Israel Troops

By JOHN KIFNER, Special to The New York Times

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Transcribed from the clipping

NABLUS, Israeli-Occupied West Bank, Jan. 22 — Both hands encased in plaster casts, Imad Omar Abu Rub explained from his bed in the Rafidiya Hospital what happened when the Israeli Army came to the Palestinian village of Qabatiya. “They entered the house like animals, shouting,” the 22-year-old student at Bir Zeit University said.

“They took us from the house, kicking us in the head, beating us, all the soldiers with their rifle butts.” Then he was taken to the construction site of an unfinished house where, he said, the soldiers put an empty bucket over his head. Beaten With Two-by-Fours Several soldiers held him down, he said, gripping his arms to force his hands against a rock.

Two others, he said, beat his hands with lengths of two-by-fours, breaking the bones. The injuries are the product of a new, officially declared policy of the Israeli Army and the police to beat up Palestinians in hopes of ending the wave of protests in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip that began in early December.

At least 38 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli gunfire in the protests. The new tactic is being employed as an alternative to the use of live ammunition. In the bed next to Mr. Abu Rub’s, Hassan Arif Kemal, a 17-year-old high school student from Qabatiya, told a nearly identical story.

Mother Says She Was Beaten, Too He said that he, too, had been pulled from his house by the army and taken to a construction site, and that his hands had been broken by soldiers wielding two-by-fours. His mother, an elderly looking woman with a baleful glare, said she was beaten and bruised as she tried to stop the soldiers from taking her son.

Six people from Qabatiya were admitted to Rafidiya Hospital on Wednes-

How this transcription was made

Transcribed from the slide scan by a reader working off magnified crops, not by optical character recognition. The newspaper is printed on the clipping twice, in the credit line “Special to The New York Times” under the byline and in the upper photograph’s credit “The New York Times/Micha Bar-Am”. There is no masthead, no folio and no printed year. The day and month come from the printed dateline, “NABLUS, Israeli-Occupied West Bank, Jan. 22”; the year is corroborated by the article’s own figures, protests that began in early December with a toll of at least 38 Palestinians, which is the first intifada in January 1988, and by the slide-mate three days earlier, which prints a dated masthead. The clipping is a page fragment also carrying an unrelated Pentagon story, which is not transcribed, and the excerpt ends on a broken word at the jump line.

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