Hartford Courant · Hartford, CT · 18 December 2004
CP-2004-051
8 Killed In Palestinian Refugee Camp
Hundreds are forced to flee their homes as Israel responds to recent attacks against a Jewish settlement.
Los Angeles Times
Transcribed from the clipping
JERUSALEM — Backed by combat helicopters, Israeli troops and tanks pushed their way into a Palestinian refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday, killing at least eight Palestinians and wounding scores of others, hospital officials said.
Continuing unrest in Gaza has been causing political headaches for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as he seeks to pursue his plan to uproot the Jewish settlements of the seaside strip next year.
Sharon lost his parliamentary majority during infighting over the Gaza withdrawal and has been seeking to shore up his conservative government by allying with the left-leaning Labor Party. Israeli news reports said Friday night that an agreement had been reached granting Labor eight Cabinet positions, including deputy prime minister for party leader Shimon Peres.
Sharon’s political foes say violence in Gaza underscores the need for Israeli forces to maintain a tight grip on the territory to prevent it from becoming a staging ground for attacks against Israel. Supporters of the withdrawal plan insist that the Mediterranean enclave is a quagmire from which Israelis should extricate themselves as soon as possible.
The Khan Younis camp, a sprawling enclave of alleyways and concrete-slab buildings only yards from the Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim, has in recent days been used by Palestinian militants as the launching site for mortar attacks against Jewish settlers. A young Thai woman working at one settlement was killed in such a barrage this week.
“More than 50 mortar shells were fired at Jewish communities in the last week,” Col. Ofer Winter, an Israeli army commander in Gaza, told Israel Radio. “This is unacceptable. So long as our residents have no peace, neither shall theirs.”
As the Israeli troops moved into the camp, hundreds of panicked Palestinian civilians fled their homes in darkness and freezing temperatures, according to Palestinian officials. “They shelled our neighborhoods and broke the windows, and then they called us by loudspeaker to leave our homes,” said 34-year-old Palestinian mother Lubna Asfour.
“We didn’t have a chance to take anything with us.”
How this transcription was made
Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping. Adjudicated confirmed against the printed page: No masthead or folio — the margin above the headline is blank — so this is not folio-verified. The date is fixed to the day by the story itself: Israeli troops "pushed their way into a Palestinian ref.
Context added by this archive
The sharpest Winter sentence in the whole batch and the sharpest Palestinian sentence in the whole batch sit in the same two columns of a wire story. Nothing about the Hannibal Directive.
Note the structure: the headline counts the dead without naming the killer (‘8 Killed In Palestinian Refugee Camp’) while the deck frames the operation as a response (‘as Israel responds to recent attacks against a Jewish settlement’).
Cite this clipping
"8 Killed In Palestinian Refugee Camp," Hartford Courant, 18 December 2004. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2004-051. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2004-051
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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.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2004-051.
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