Israeli Troops Fire on Arab Protest, 2 Die

Two Palestinian students were killed and at least 11 were wounded Thursday when Israeli troops opened fire on demonstrators at the occupied West Bank’s second largest university, military and university officials reported.

The incident at Birzeit University, about 20 miles north of Jerusalem, was believed to be the bloodiest campus clash in the territory since Israel captured it from Jordan in the Six-Day War of 1967.

Late Thursday, the army sealed off Ramallah, a nearby Palestinian town of about 15,000, and declared it to be a closed military area.

The campus trouble started Thursday morning at a military roadblock set up to check documents of students and faculty members entering the campus. But from that point on, versions of events given by the army and by university officials differ radically.

According to an army spokesman, the military had information that “radical elements in the Palestine Liberation Organization who want to push this situation to extremes” planned some kind of protest action. The university, which numbers about 2,500 students, is considered a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism.

The spokesman said that a Birzeit professor, identified by colleagues as Saleh Abdel Jawad, got out of his car, which was in a long line at the roadblock, and sat in the middle of the street in protest. Other students and faculty joined him, and soon the sit-in numbered 200 people.

Army reinforcements called to disperse the crowd were stoned, according to the military, and responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. They arrested the professor.

About an hour later, the army spokesman said, students already on campus began stoning a military lookout post nearby while their compatriots, using rocks and scrap set aside ahead of time, blocked roads, apparently to keep army reinforcements from reaching the area.

Troops Open Fire

Outnumbered soldiers, unable in any other way to repulse the new attacks by students throwing rocks and pieces of scrap metal, followed standing orders that allow them to open fire in what the spokesman described as “a life threatening situation.”

The spokesman said the army called for ambulances, but the emergency vehicles were blocked by stone-throwing students. The spokesman also claimed that students rampaged through a nearby hospital, disrupting attempts to care for the wounded.

Israel radio later quoted the Israeli military commander of the area as saying the incident at the roadblock and the later, fatal demonstration were not related. The second demonstration, according to the officer, was in protest over Israel’s reported support of Lebanon’s Amal militia in its fight against PLO guerrillas around Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon.

Israeli navy gunboats shelled what Israel described as terrorist targets around Palestinian refugee camps near Sidon on Wednesday.

Army Launches Probe

The Israeli army has opened a “thorough investigation” into the Birzeit clash, an army spokesman added.

Birzeit faculty members who witnessed the events sharply disputed the army’s account.

“The brutality on the part of the authorities started a tragic chain of events,” asserted Roger Heacock, an American professor from Philadelphia who teaches cultural studies at the university.

University spokesman Albert Aghazarian told a crowded East Jerusalem press conference just hours after the shooting stopped that trouble had been building because of what he described as the “daily humiliation and harassment” of the university community by the army.

He said that Thursday was the 12th day in the last six weeks that the army had set up a roadblock at the entrance to the campus, disrupting classes and angering students.

When the students and faculty responded with a peaceful sit-in protest, according to Heacock, soldiers began firing tear gas from close range, with almost no warning.

An Eyewitness Account

Heacock, who said he was an eyewitness, said that Jawad, the arrested professor, is “being made a scapegoat for the excesses committed by the occupation forces.”

Shortly after mid-morning, according to Hana Mikhail Ashrawi, dean of Birzeit’s faculty of arts, about 200 more students, angry about the roadblock incident, marched off the campus. “They had just gone out when the army started shooting,” she said, adding that while she could see soldiers firing, she could not see what the students were doing.

“At the worst, they were throwing stones,” said Aghazarian. “But you don’t go on shooting at people with live bullets for that.”

Ashrawi quoted an ambulance driver as saying he was delayed in reaching the wounded not by students, as the army claimed, but by military roadblocks. The professors said that 15 students were wounded, while the army said only 11 were hurt.

Heacock, who said he went to the Ramallah hospital to offer aid, told reporters that while he was there troops “stormed” it in an apparent effort to disperse students and other Palestinians who had come to donate blood for the wounded.

Heacock said one Palestinian was shot and wounded by the army on the hospital grounds, but he later admitted he had not witnessed the event.

However, a man who identified himself as Birzeit student Ahmed Moussa said that he was also at the hospital and saw a young man and a girl wounded in the legs as soldiers fired toward the ground to disperse the crowd.

Aghazarian identified the dead students as Jawad abu Salmieh, 22, a fourth-year chemistry major, and Saeb Mahmoud Zahab, also 22, a first-year student. Both are from the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip.

The area known as the West Bank of the Jordan River is home to more than 800,000 Palestinians and about 60,000 Jewish settlers.