Israel May Seal Off Territories : Proposal Triggered by Planned Arab Protest Wednesday

Top Israeli officials are weighing a proposal to seal off the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip this week as part of security precautions against major demonstrations planned for Wednesday by both Israeli Arabs and Palestinians from the territories, a senior security source said Sunday.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the proposed ban would prevent residents on both sides of the so-called Green Line from crossing it.

The invisible boundary divides pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas that it occupied after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. There are about 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who live as Israeli citizens inside Israel proper and another 1.4 million in the territories who are either stateless or hold Jordanian citizenship.

Strike Planned

Israeli Arabs have declared a general strike for Wednesday as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian uprising that has rocked the West Bank and Gaza Strip for nearly 16 weeks. The date, March 30, also commemorates protests in 1976 against Israeli land confiscations that left six Arabs dead.

The self-styled Unified National Leadership for the Uprising in the Occupied Territories has also called for a general strike that day and for “huge demonstrations against the army and (Jewish) settlers.”

Fearing that the so-called Land Day protests may lead to widespread violence, the authorities are reportedly planning a long list of countermeasures.

Israel Radio reported that Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Police Minister Chaim Bar-Lev briefed their fellow Cabinet members on some of those measures during a regular meeting of the government Sunday. The briefing was held in the framework of the Ministerial Defense Committee, whose deliberations are secret.

‘One of the Proposals’

It was not clear whether the proposal to seal the borders of the occupied territories was aired in the Cabinet. However, the senior security source confirmed, “there is a proposal like that. It is one of the proposals. But nobody decided until now.”

The source added that a decision is expected by tonight. He added that it is not clear whether the ban would also exclude all news media coverage inside the occupied territories.

Earlier this month, the authorities imposed a ban on travel by Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza Strip in hopes that it would impair coordination of anti-Israeli protest actions. However, that ban has not prevented occupants of the territories from traveling across the Green Line into Israel proper. Nor has it stopped Israeli Arabs from entering the territories.

Israel Radio reported Sunday that many Israeli Arabs have been detained or interrogated in the northern part of the country in the last two days. It quoted unnamed Arab sources as saying that “scores” of individuals are involved and that they are being detained preventively in advance of Wednesday’s Land Day protests.

Police sources denied the allegation and said that the only Israeli Arabs held are those who had been involved in illegal disturbances during the last three months, state radio added.

The authorities are particularly sensitive to unrest among Israeli Arabs, since they are widely seen by the Jewish majority as a litmus test of whether there can ever be a stable and peaceful coexistence between Jew and Arab here. There is actually a slight majority of Israeli Arabs over Israeli Jews in the north of the country, and cities such as Haifa and Jaffa have large Arab minorities.

The mostly unspoken fear among Israeli Jews is that Israeli Arabs will turn into a kind of Fifth Column, advancing militant Palestinian dreams of replacing the Jewish state with a Palestinian Arab state in all of what is now Israel and the occupied territories.

So far there have been only relatively minor incidents of anti-government violence among Israeli Arabs since the unrest began in the territories last Dec. 9.

That unrest claimed four more Palestinian victims on Sunday, bringing the death toll to at least 112 Arabs and one Israeli soldier.

Military sources confirmed that three Arabs were killed and two others wounded before dawn when soldiers entered the village of Meithalun, between Nablus and Janin in the northern part of the West Bank, to arrest alleged inciters. The soldiers were attacked by hundreds of residents, according to the army, including at least two who tried to run them down with their vehicles.

Troops opened fire in self-defense, the army said. Palestinian sources identified the dead as Omar Rabaiah, 23, Ghassan Nueirat, 17, and Mahmoud Nueirat, 26.

In another incident, troops came under attack in the West Bank village of Salfit, 12 miles north of Ramallah, when they moved in to rescue a tourist bus driver, according to the military. The driver was said to have blundered into the village and then panicked, even though he was not attacked.

But as an army patrol led him back to the main road, residents started throwing stones and iron bars at the troops, the military said. Believing his men to be in danger, the commander ordered them to open fire, according to the army’s account, killing one boy and wounding an unknown number of others.

Palestinian sources identified the dead villager as Yasser Khirbawi, 14.

Troops also clashed with protesters after Palm Sunday church services in Bethlehem and Ramallah, but no serous injuries were reported, according to residents. Troops in Ramallah also smashed the windows of a free-lance photographer’s car with rubber bullets and fired tear gas into the vehicle, witnesses said.