Israelis Kill 2 Palestinians in West Bank

Israeli troops shot and killed two Palestinians on Thursday after soldiers were stoned as they tried to arrest uprising activists in a West Bank village, the army said.

The killings occurred in Beit Furik, a village of about 5,000 people near Nablus.

Five other Palestinians, two of them women, suffered gunshot wounds in the incident, Arab reports said.

In the occupied Gaza Strip, 17 Palestinians were shot and wounded in scattered stone-throwing clashes with Israeli troops, Arab reports said.

Also Thursday, more than 150 Palestinian university administrators and professors launched a campaign to demand that Israel reopen colleges and universities closed by the army almost since the start of the Palestinian uprising.

At an organizational meeting, the group said the closures in the West Bank and Gaza since January, 1988 are depriving 42,000 Palestinians of an education and damaging the institutions’ finances.

“We are being banned from a basic right, access to schools and universities,” Adib Khatib, a vice president at An Najah University in Nablus, told the meeting in Jerusalem.