Palestinian Student Killed in Clash With Israeli Forces at West Bank University

Israeli security forces on the occupied West Bank shot a Palestinian student to death and wounded four others in a campus clash Monday after earlier arresting dozens of Arabs in a new crackdown.

The military governor of the territory ordered Birzeit University, site of the clash, closed for four months. He also closed Bethlehem University for a week and imposed a curfew on the Balata Palestinian refugee camp near Nablus after rocks were thrown at Israeli vehicles.

Palestinian sources identified the slain youth as Moussa Hanafi, a fourth-year business student from Rafah, in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Israeli military sources said he was killed and the other students wounded when security forces opened fire to save two soldiers who had been trapped by rock-throwing protesters.

The incidents followed a violent weekend in which Ofra Moses, a pregnant Jewish woman, burned to death in a car hit by a firebomb believed to have been thrown by an Arab. Her husband and two sons and a friend of one of the youngsters were all injured in the attack, which occurred Saturday near the family’s home in Alfe Menashe, a West Bank Jewish settlement about five miles east of Kfar Sava.

Afterward, enraged neighbors and friends of the Moses family and other settlers rampaged through Qalqiliya, a West Bank Palestinian town near where the incident occurred, damaging cars, homes and other property.

Situation Already Tense

The weekend incidents added fuel to what was already a tense situation on the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River, captured by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967.

A three-week-old strike by Palestinian prisoners demanding improved jail conditions has triggered demonstrations among the 800,000 Palestinians who live under Israeli military rule on the West Bank and another 500,000 in the Gaza Strip. The strikers are among about 4,000 Arab security-law violators who want to be recognized as political prisoners rather than common criminals.

Also, according to Israeli security officials, a scheduled meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers, Algeria, next week has intensified political activity in the territories among various Palestine Liberation Organization factions anxious to show their strength among the local population. The Palestine National Council has been called the Palestinians’ parliament-in-exile.

An army spokesman acknowledged Monday that “dozens of arrests” had been made the previous night on the West Bank and in mostly Arab East Jerusalem. He described those detained as “PLO leaders.”

Informed Palestinian sources said Monday night that they knew of at least 109 people arrested. Among them, one source said, were “personalities supporting all the various factions of the PLO.”

Nine of those detained were placed under administrative arrest, which means that they can be held for six months without formal charges being brought.

Most prominent among those administratively detained is Faisal Husseini, head of East Jerusalem’s Arab Studies Society, a Palestinian research institute, and a spokesman for the so-called “Committee Confronting the Iron Fist,” which wages a publicity campaign against what it calls the repression of Palestinians living under Israeli rule.

Husseini’s father led the Arab irregular forces in Jerusalem in the 1948 war that led to Israeli independence. One of his uncles was the virulently anti-Jewish former grand mufti of Jerusalem during British-mandate rule over Palestine.

Husseini is a vocal supporter of the PLO here. Israeli security sources depict him as the group’s top organizer in the occupied territories. He was released last month from 5 1/2 years of house arrest.

Other Palestinians placed under administrative detention include a former editor of the pro-PLO East Jerusalem newspaper Al Fajr and a principal in the joint Arab-Jewish Alternative Information Center, which monitors Israeli rule in the territories and distributes critical reports to local and foreign media.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin reportedly promised at Sunday’s regular meeting of the Israeli Cabinet that he would step up the use of administrative arrest and deportation of Palestinians in order to combat the latest wave of violence.

50 Believed Detained

About 50 Palestinians are believed to be detained under administrative order. The authorities have deported 15 West Bank residents since reinstituting the practice in August, 1985, following five years of disuse.

Rabin pledged publicly to use “whatever measures that are allowed by the law to ensure to everybody the right to drive freely and securely along the roads; to cope with those who try to instigate terror acts, those who organize (them) and those who carry them out.”

There were stepped-up patrols in major West Bank Arab cities Monday and around a score of Palestinian refugee camps in the area.

Militant Israeli settlers contend that attacks such as the one that killed Ofra Moses last weekend are inspired by government lenience toward Palestinian security offenders.

Ask Death Penalty

About 60,000 Jewish settlers now live on the West Bank, and some of their leaders renewed calls Monday to impose the death penalty for terrorist killings and to step up the Jewish settlement drive.

The Jerusalem Post reported Monday that “some participants” at a Sunday night meeting of the Council of Settlements of Judea, Samaria (the biblical names settlers prefer for the West Bank) and Gaza proposed vigilante action against Palestinians.

There were unconfirmed reports here that settlers were involved in Monday’s clashes at Birzeit.