The New York Times · 27 August 2001

CP-2001-049

A Perilous Road in Israel Becomes a Death Trap Again

By CLYDE HABERMAN

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Transcribed from the clipping

MODIIN, Israel, Aug. 26 — Route 443 makes it an easy drive here from Jerusalem, 15 miles to the east. But for Israelis, the question is whether they will make it at all. Too many of them have not. The Modiin road, as Route 443 is sometimes called, winds through brown hills of jutting rock.

It is mostly smooth and dependable, and it takes maybe 15 minutes to get from Jerusalem’s northern outskirts to this growing town grazing the southwestern lip of the West Bank. It can be a pleasant shortcut for anyone heading to Tel Aviv, along the Mediterranean coast. For Israelis, it has become a death road. A stretch of Route 443 slices through the West Bank.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of the last 11 months, it has become a fine target for Palestinian gunmen, who can lie in ambush, wait for an Israeli car, fire away and dissolve into nearby villages. At least half a dozen Israelis have been killed on this road, a number that grew late Saturday night when Palestinians shot at a car carrying five members of the same family.

Two died right away, a husband and wife, Yaniv and Sharon Ben-Shalom. Mrs. Ben-Shalom’s brother, Doron Sviri, shot in the head, died today as the young couple were being buried. Their two little girls, Shahar and Efrat, ages 6 months and 18 months, were slightly wounded. The deaths contributed to one of the grislier weekends in this unending crisis.

It also saw three Israeli soldiers killed on Saturday during a daring raid by two Palestinians on an army base near a bloc of settlements in the Gaza Strip. The two attackers were themselves killed.

Overnight, in retaliation, Israeli F-16 planes and tanks demolished police headquarters in four Palestinian towns, actions that were largely casualty-free, aimed as they were at evacuated buildings, but that led nonetheless to the death of a Palestinian security officer in Gaza. The staccato of violence continued through today.

An unidentified Israeli man from the coastal town of Netanya was shot to death on a little-traveled road north of Tulkarm in the West Bank. The same group that said it had fired on the Ben-Shalom family, the Aksa Martyrs Brigade, took responsibility for today’s attack as well.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 2.5x to 12x by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by OCR and not by a person. The folio prints 'THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL MONDAY, AUGUST' and is then cut by the clipping edge, so the day number and year are not on the scan; 27 August 2001 was a Monday and the text's 'the last 11 months' places it eleven months after the start of the second intifada. 'Aksa Martyrs Brigade' is the paper's spelling and is kept. A second photograph lower on the page carries its own caption, of Yasir Arafat, which is not in photo_caption. On this page the Israeli dead are named and aged, including two infants, and the Palestinians killed are not named at all.

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