The New York Times · New York, New York · 31 October 1991

CP-1991-035

Mideast Clashes Kill One Arab And Wound 35

But Backers of P.L.O. Stage a Peace March

By CLYDE HABERMAN, Special to The New York Times

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM, Oct. 30 — The opening of the Madrid peace conference was greeted in the Middle East today with new bloodshed and calls for an Islamic holy war against Israel, but also with a rare peace march by supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

One Palestinian youth was shot to death and at least 35 others were wounded in stone-throwing clashes with the Israeli Army in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was an uncommonly high casualty count even for people grown numb to the incessant mayhem produced by the four-year-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.

Still more unusual were violent battles that erupted, notably in Gaza City, between rival groups of Palestinians who disagree on whether their leaders should be attending the peace talks.

And perhaps more extraordinary yet was the pro-peace march by more than 2,000 Palestinians through the dusty streets of Gaza City, where many of them openly carried knives, clubs and chains, and waved Palestinian flags. Every aspect of this event — the weapons, the flags, the march itself — is banned by the Israeli Army, and normally would invite swift arrest.

Instead, dozens of Israeli soldiers followed the marchers, all supporters of the mainstream Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in a clear attempt to encourage the demonstration, at least this one time. Some of the Palestinians responded by handing the soldiers olive branches, still another action that is hardly routine.

Near a central square, the Fatah marchers ran into a group from the fundamentalist Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, which had called a protest general strike today that closed shops and other businesses through most of Gaza and the West Bank.

The two sides clashed in a burst of knife-slashing, stone-throwing and window-smashing at a nearby mosque that sent four Hamas supporters to the hospital with stab wounds.

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