Troops Keep Low Profile as Most Palestinians Stay at Home

Israeli troops kept a generally low profile and most Palestinians stayed home Tuesday as the first day of an unprecedented 72-hour closing order passed relatively quietly in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The army reported one serious clash in the West Bank village of Zeita, north of Tulkarm, where stone- and firebomb-throwing youths blocked roads and confronted a military patrol. The troops fired at the legs of the protesters, according to an army report, after failing to disperse them with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Five protesters were wounded by gunfire and three were injured by tear gas, the army said. The pro-nationalist Palestine Press Service said that “more than a dozen” villagers were wounded.

Demonstrations Today

Israeli authorities Monday night declared the occupied territories closed military areas in the hope of forestalling major demonstrations that have been planned for today in connection with “Land Day.”

The date marks the anniversary of a 1976 incident in which six demonstrators were killed while protesting government confiscation of Arab lands in northern Israel. It is usually observed primarily by the 700,000 Arabs who live as Israeli citizens inside the so-called Green Line that defines the country’s pre-1967 borders. This year it has been billed as a day of solidarity with the Palestinian uprising that has rocked the occupied territories for the last 16 weeks. More than 100 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have died in the unrest.

The army’s closure order means that some 800,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are to be restricted to their towns or villages until Friday. More than 600,000 Arab inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are under a more severe curfew confining them to their homes.

Only Israeli citizens who are residents of the occupied territories are permitted to enter the area while the order is in effect. Journalists are allowed into the areas only with special authorization from the army spokesman’s office.

However, there appeared to be considerable confusion about the rules Tuesday, both for civilians and for the news media. Many tourists, for example, were reportedly waved past army roadblocks and permitted into Bethlehem despite an amended announcement by the military spokesman that they too are covered by the travel ban.

Western and Israeli journalists probing to find the actual perimeter of the closed area reached such major West Bank towns as Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah and Nablus, in some cases without encountering army roadblocks.

Some Jewish settlement leaders, opposed to the media ban, used their right of passage into the West Bank to help journalists visit the area. The army order was supposed to virtually seal the Green Line to traffic in either direction, but many Palestinians also were being permitted into the territories, apparently in recognition that the lightning ban, imposed less than four hours after its announcement, had caught thousands unaware.

Israel Radio reported Tuesday that 800 Arabs in the Gaza Strip were given special permission to re-enter the area after finishing work in Israel. But it said they will not be permitted to leave until Friday.

Predictably, the army order took a toll of innocent victims, condemned by circumstances seemingly beyond their control.

At a roadblock near the Kalandiyeh refugee camp, on the main road between Jerusalem and Nablus, 52-year-old Hilwe Abed Odeh was refused entry to the area because her identity card carries her old address, in a suburb of East Jerusalem, rather than her new one, just across the Green Line near Atarot.

“I came here by car, and the car left me,” she complained to a reporter. She said she had been allowed through the checkpoint in the morning to go shopping. “I bought toys for my grandchildren so they will play inside the house and not go out,” she said.

Wondering What to Do

She was still there, wondering what to do next, when the journalist left a few minutes later.

Other Palestinians got around army roadblocks on the back roads that lace the countryside of the West Bank. A man from Bethlehem said he was turned back on three different routes to Jerusalem before getting through on a dirt track that he described as so old that “I think Christ probably used it.”

Compared to normal times, there were far fewer people and much less traffic throughout the West Bank and mostly Arab East Jerusalem, according to residents and firsthand observation.

A Ramallah man said panicky residents, caught off guard by the Israeli sanctions, raced to stores early Tuesday to stock up on food and other necessities during the morning hours that the shops have been observing lately, in accordance with instructions from the underground leadership of the uprising.

As part of a continuing army effort to force merchants into defying the underground orders, troops in jeeps announced over loudspeakers that the stores could not open until noon. Soldiers confiscated the identity cards of shopkeepers who tried to disobey and threatened to weld their stores closed, the Ramallah man said. After the stores closed, he said, the streets emptied of most residents and soldiers. Troops continued to stand guard on rooftops, however.

Foreign journalists and the Palestine Press Service were able to gather reports from most major West Bank towns Tuesday by telephone, although the lines to some towns and camps were cut by the military.

It was virtually impossible to get through by telephone to the Gaza Strip, although William Lee, a spokesman for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, said he was able to reach the agency’s headquarters in Gaza City once.

Lee quoted the agency director in Gaza, Bernard Mills, as saying the area resembled “a gigantic ghost town, as if the whole population was under house arrest.” Lee said the agency’s clinics were operating and that “a few women and children got to them.” There were no reports of trouble in Gaza except for “a few burning tires,” he added.

Here in Nablus, only a small fraction of the normal afternoon traffic was on the streets. Shops were almost all closed, as residents said they had been for about a week. There were relatively few pedestrians to be seen.

The army appeared to be keeping a low profile, residents said. There were no troops on guard at the main entrance to the militant Balata refugee camp, which was under curfew after another in a series of violent disturbances there late last week. Two residents were killed by army gunfire in the latest clashes.

Taking advantage of the calm, two groups of about 20 soldiers each were seen jogging in the late afternoon sunshine near the city center.

Whether Tuesday’s relative quiet in the territories represented a victory for the army’s latest tactic remains to be seen, however.

For the short term, the main test of the new sanctions will come today. The latest bulletin of the Unified National Leadership for the Uprising in the Occupied Territories had not called for protests Tuesday. Instead, it called for a “day of repentance, when all those who have departed from the will of their people will have an opportunity to return . . . and cleanse their consciences.” But it said that today should be marked by “huge demonstrations against the army and settlers.”