Rabin Sees Palestinian Leaders About Uprising

The Israeli army Sunday closed three Arab schools where student protests have erupted, and a spokesman for Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said Rabin has met with Palestinian leaders in an effort to resolve the uprising.

“He’s trying to create a dialogue, to ask what is happening and about the future, what they suggest” as solutions, spokesman Eitan Haber said. He would not elaborate.

Haber would not say where or when the meetings had taken place.

The daily newspaper Haaretz reported that the defense minister recently met with an author of the Palestinian national charter, the platform of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The report did not name the Palestinian or give the date of the meeting.

Fear of Assassination

A government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Rabin decided against publishing the names of the Palestinian leaders who met him, fearing they could be assassinated.

The decision followed the June 7 stabbing and wounding of the Israeli-appointed mayor of the West Bank town of Al Birah, Hassan Tawil.

In a related development, Shaike Erez, a military governor for the West Bank, met with more than 30 Arab merchants in the city of Ramallah to discuss “ways of improving commerce” in the face of repeated strikes by the Arab protesters, Olivier Rafowicz, a spokesman for the military government in the West Bank, said.

Rafowicz described the talks as “very good” but refused to elaborate.

News of Rabin’s meetings with local leaders in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip followed a weekend of violence in the territories that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War.

At least 196 Palestinians and two Israelis have been killed since the uprising began Dec. 9, according to the Israeli army.

In the West Bank, troops Sunday shot and wounded a 20-year-old Palestinian during disturbances in a village near Nablus, a military spokesman said.

The spokesman said Arab residents attacked a routine army patrol “with rocks, slingshots and road blockades.” An official at the Ittihad hospital in Nablus said the man was hit in the left side of the neck but was in fair condition.

Two Schools Closed by Army

The army closed two schools in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip on Sunday after student protests erupted, the military government spokesmen said. Rafowicz said they will be closed “several days.”

Arab schools in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were closed for about four months by authorities who said they were staging grounds for disturbances in the uprising. The schools reopened in late May and early June.

Also Sunday, government leaders issued an appeal for Israelis to help battle hundreds of fires that are being blamed on Arab arsonists.

Cabinet ministers at their weekly meeting appealed to Israelis to “help all bodies that deal with extinguishing and preventing fires.” Thousands of blazes have broken out since early May and have destroyed more than 25,000 acres of trees and pasture land, a government statement said.