The Arizona Republic · Phoenix, Arizona · 11 October 1996
CP-1996-003
Netanyahu’s 450 ‘security reasons’
Concern for future of settlers stalls withdrawal from Hebron
The Associated Press, Hebron
Transcribed from the clipping
“HEBRON, West Bank — When 4-year-old Yiska Federman wanders out to play, Israeli soldiers keep watch from a sandbagged guard post on her doorstep and from a nearby rooftop… Yiska and the rest of Hebron’s 450 Jews are the ‘security reasons’ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cites when he balks at fulfilling Israel’s promise to withdraw from most of this West Bank town, where 94,000 Palestinians wait impatiently for self-rule… ‘They live in ghettos, and they don’t want any relations with Arabs,’ said Samira Sarabateh, a Palestinian mother of nine.
‘We don’t want any relations with them either, because they came and stole our land and our houses and attacked us… I don’t believe there’s going to be any peace with these settlers.
At the end, it’s just us or them.’… Under the existing agreements, Israel was supposed to pull its troops out of 80 percent of Hebron by last March… Soldiers would remain to protect the 52 Jewish families who live in six tiny enclaves in the city… In Hebron, normal means buses with bulletproof windows and guns tucked in the waistband of most male settlers’ pants.
It means a maze of cement blocks and strips of metal spikes put up by the army in an attempt to separate Jews and Arabs in the wake of the 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinian worshipers by a settler at the Tomb of the Patriarchs… ‘I think there should be no Palestinian weapons in Hebron at all — not one,’ said settler Orit Strook… At age 3, Yiska saw a Palestinian stab and wound a settler and another settler shoot the Palestinian dead.
‘Since then, she knows that the Arabs are our enemies,’ her mother said.”
Context added by this archive
Back in quotation marks, attached to a name, with a number on it. The settlers are given as much room on the page as the Palestinians, and the record now holds both.
Cite this clipping
"Netanyahu’s 450 ‘security reasons’," The Arizona Republic, 11 October 1996, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1996-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1996-003
This clipping is read closely in the section below
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
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