Arabs Blamed for Woman’s Death
Israeli police and military sources said Sunday that Arabs, not Jewish settlers, apparently killed an elderly Palestinian woman picking figs in the occupied West Bank the day before.
Police initially suspected Jewish settlers killed Ratibah Abdel-Karim Jabra, 70, and slightly wounded Rifah Mahmoud Jasser, 52, in a fig grove near the Palestinian village of Ein Yabrud. The village is next to the Jewish settlement of Ofra.
But a police spokesman and military sources said Sunday that they had no evidence Jewish settlers killed her and believed that two Arabs did it for criminal, not political, motives.
The police spokesman said Jasser had told police interrogators that there were two assailants and that one spoke a dialect of Arabic used by Arab villagers in the West Bank.
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