Gaza Cauldron of Hatred Boils More Furiously

A thin, wispy-haired young boy, no more than 9 years old, hurled himself down the main street here Saturday, his small fist flailing in the air as he ran. Rage was all over his face. “God is great!” he screamed in a reedy voice, joining a chant that soon spread all over the city’s main square.

In the middle of the square, three Israeli soldiers feinted angrily at the crowd of stone throwers lobbing from behind parked cars. A trio of youths prodded an old refrigerator and a rusty sink into the street to block an oncoming army truck. Then one of the soldiers dropped to his knees, raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired a hail of plastic bullets down the avenue.

The first casualties in a long three days of violence--among the worst in Gaza in the 28-month-old Palestinian uprising--streamed in to nearby Ahli Hospital. A teen-ager had a gouge in his back where a bullet had grazed him. A 50-year-old garbage collector lay bleeding on a gurney while doctors pulled a plastic slug out of his head near his eye.

There was another sickening pop outside. “I hear gunfire!” a Palestinian journalist interviewing the patients declared urgently.

“Yeah,” the British doctor who was supervising the casualties, a pregnant belly swelling under her white overcoat, said absentmindedly.

The journalist looked sheepish. “I think there is a lot of shooting now,” he said, and picked up a cup of tea.

The worst of the violence began Thursday morning in the teeming Jabaliya refugee camp five minutes from downtown Gaza City, when, in one of the bloodiest clashes of the uprising, soldiers fired into an angry crowd of thousands after morning prayers celebrating the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, killing three and injuring as many as 150.

Nine other Arabs were shot and wounded for breaking a subsequent curfew at Jabaliya on Friday; five others were wounded in a clash near the Gaza City mosque, and at least two from Gaza City were wounded Saturday. A fourth Palestinian, part of a procession of Muslim worshipers who pelted an army compound with stones, was shot and killed by soldiers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Thursday.

The escalation comes at a time of political crisis in Israel, erupting only hours before Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, committed to peace talks with the Palestinians, admitted defeat in his attempt to form a new government and left the job to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and his hawkish Likud Party colleagues.

“These days the country is in a state of political and public confusion such as it has never known since its founding,” President Chaim Herzog said Friday in Jerusalem, calling on Shamir to move quickly to end the political stalemate. “To my regret, since the crisis and the beginning of the process to form a government, we are witnesses to expressions and phenomenons of verbal and physical violence, which make me fear at the thought of where they might end if they do not stop immediately.”

Gaza Palestinian leader Zakaria Agha said the political frustration was a crucial factor in the weekend violence, which, according to witnesses, apparently began when Israeli soldiers fired tear gas into the mosque and escalated when a furious crowd of thousands began breaking through the barbed wire surrounding a military encampment inside Jabaliya.

“People here feel the Israelis are blocking every way for peace,” Agha said. “Mr. Shamir will form what will be called a war government. They speak about crushing the intifada (uprising), so our people want to say to Mr. Shamir and his colleagues, ‘If you want to crush the intifada, you are welcome to try.’ ”

The violence also followed an address by Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on Jordanian television Wednesday night declaring that the intifada would go on despite the political turmoil.

“I think part of what happened was in support of our chairman,” Agha said. “This is a message to the Israeli leaders and the whole world that the intifada is not fading, as they try to describe it.”

Witnesses in Gaza City, including two men injured in the Thursday melee, said the crowd became so enraged that people broke through a thick roll of barbed wire surrounding the military camp and planted a Palestinian flag inside.

Ahmed, 26, said he was at home when he heard a plea for assistance being broadcast from the loudspeakers of the mosque at Jabaliya. “Help all your brothers in the mosque!” it said, and he ran out to find tear gas streaming from the windows.

“We went running toward the mosque and threw stones at it to make the soldiers chase us, to attract their attention away from the mosque,” he said. Ahmed, who declined to give his last name, said he was shot as he ran to help two friends who had been shot, both of whom died.

Gaza commander Brig. Gen. Schmuel Zucker told army radio that soldiers avoided shooting “until the stones began to endanger their lives.”

At least two other locations in Gaza, the Shati refugee camp and parts of Gaza City, were under curfew, and similar curfews were imposed on the West Bank towns of Anabta and Nablus.

Outside the Ahli Hospital on Saturday, a young Palestinian strode up toward the main square and shouted tauntingly, in Hebrew, at two soldiers pointing their rifles down from a nearby rooftop. “We will have an independent Palestine!” he asserted. A hail of stones flew up onto the roof with his words. The soldiers aimed, then ducked.

“They don’t want to fight today,” said one Palestinian watching the action. “When they disperse the demonstrators, it is like the hell. Here, everybody is tired. . . . People are very exhausted. But at the same time, people are like a man who is handcuffed, and his legs are tied, and still he struggles with his body. People are still struggling. Because there is no other way.”

BACKGROUND

An area of 147 square miles--about the size of Detroit--the Gaza Strip has a population of about 500,000, 99.8% of whom are Palestinian Arab and 0.2% Jewish. For four centuries, it was ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire before Britain gained control of the entire Palestinian region in 1917. In 1947, the United Nations mandated partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, but the Arabs claimed the entire region. Britain withdrew in 1948, setting the stage for the first of a series of Arab-Israeli wars. In the armistice of 1949, Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip, without granting Palestinian autonomy. In the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied both territories--a situation that prevails to this day.