Israeli Stabbed, Settlers Turn on Journalists

A group of Jewish settlers, enraged by the stabbing minutes before of an unarmed 16-year-old student, turned their anger on Western journalists Thursday, roughing up at least three of them and sending a woman photographer to the hospital, where five stitches were required to close a head wound.

It was believed to be the first incident in nearly three months of violence in the occupied territories in which settlers attacked journalists. There have been several confrontations between journalists and Israeli army troops, as well as stepped-up criticism by political leaders here of what they call biased media coverage of the unrest.

The criticism also extends to the Israeli media, but it has focused on the international press, particularly on the major television networks and photo agencies, whose work is seen as giving rise to Western, particularly American, criticism of Israeli policy in the occupied territories.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said in a speech to American Jewish leaders Wednesday night that he is considering new restrictions “like closing parts of the country to the media to reduce the damage that they are doing unjustly to the state.”

“There is no lack of people (Israeli officials) who are ready to explain what is happening,” Shamir said. “The trouble is they (reporters) don’t want to listen to us. They are looking for Arab sources. Some of them even live in Arab areas and get their information from their neighbors.”

Western journalists also came under scattered attacks by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip early in the disturbances, which are now 11 weeks old, but there have been no such attacks recently.

The Hebron incident began when Aharon Peretz, a religious-school student, was stabbed in the back and slightly wounded by an unidentified Arab assailant as he emerged from an Arab-owned store in downtown Hebron, about 150 yards from a Jewish enclave called Beit Hadassah. It is one of four pockets of Jewish settlement in the otherwise Muslim Arab city of 90,000.

Several minutes later, several settlers attacked photographers outside Beit Hadassah, where Peretz had been taken for first aid. Jim Hollander, chief photographer in Israel for the British news agency Reuters, was hit in the face with his camera, smashing his glasses.

The settlers struck Hollander’s wife, Rina Castelnuovo, with their fists and with her camera, knocking her to the ground and opening a wound in her forehead. She was taken by ambulance to a Jerusalem hospital for treatment and later released.

A third photographer said that he too was struck during the melee.

According to Noam Arnon, a Beit Hadassah resident and spokesman for the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) Jewish settlement movement, some correspondents and photographers who rushed to the scene interfered with efforts to give Peretz medical aid in their scramble “to get better pictures.”

Arnon said Peretz’s 13-year-old brother, Tuvia, had been stabbed by an Arab less than six months ago. He said the settlers were already angry with the media because “unfortunately, in the last months we have the impression that the international press serves the aims of the Arabs and does not show the reality in ‘Eretz Israel’ as it should be shown to the world.”

“Eretz Israel” is a term that embraces pre-1967 Israel as well as the West Bank of the Jordan River and the Gaza Strip, lands occupied in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.

After the stabbing incident, as Peretz was being given first aid and the other journalists were standing about, together with perhaps two dozen settlers and army troops, several settlers accosted the media. “You cooperate with the Gentiles!” a woman shouted at an Israeli cameraman employed by the ABC television network.

Another woman, with an infant in her arms, called out: “Why are you coming at all? Just to hurt us?”

A third charged, “You know they’re killing us because of you!”

A young man who said he had lived in Southern California learned the identity of a Times reporter at the scene and called him an “anti-Semitic (obscenity),” adding, “You remember what happened to Dial Torgerson?”

Torgerson, a former chief of The Times bureau in Israel who was later assigned to Central America, was killed on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border in 1983 when the car in which he was riding struck a land mine.

A settler then struck Hollander, triggering the angry incident in which he and his wife were roughed up. Soldiers finally restored order and declared the area a military zone closed to the press.

“I believe that the press, doing its job, should not act as to show the Arab side, but to show the rights of the historic citizens of this area to return,” Arnon said at an impromptu news conference shortly after the clash with journalists.

Hebron is the traditional burial site of the patriarch Abraham, revered by both Jews and Arabs, and there is believed to have been a continuous Jewish presence here for thousands of years until 1929. Seventy Jews were slain in Arab rioting in that year, and other Jewish residents fled.

Less than a year after Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, a group of ideologically motivated settlers fought both the Arabs and Israeli authorities in order to re-establish a Jewish presence in the city. Forty families now live within its boundaries. Nearby is Kiryat Arba, one of the largest and reputedly most militant Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

Journalists were in the area Thursday morning because of plans for a procession by settlers through the city to celebrate the Jewish feast of Purim, marking the biblical rescue of Jews being massacred by Persians. It is customarily a joyous holiday.

Given Arab-Jewish tension on the West Bank after nearly three months of unrest, Israeli officials feared that the procession, which is viewed as a provocation by Arab residents, might mean trouble.

Arnon described the festivities as “like a carnival” and stressed that the procession is an annual tradition and not a provocation.

“I don’t think Jews should call off a tradition that occurs every year because of these events,” he said.

Around noon, about 100 settlers set out from Beit Hadassah in a festive march led by singing and dancing young people who were waving an Israeli flag. Costumed children of the Hebron settlers rode in two wooden carts pulled by donkeys and led by Arab men wearing kaffiyehs, traditional headdresses.

Elsewhere in the territories Thursday, at least four Arabs were wounded in clashes with troops.