Thousands More Israeli Troops Go to Territories

Hoping to break the cycle of violence that has badly sapped support for Israel’s peace agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin deployed thousands more troops Wednesday in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

With more than 120 companies of troops spread through the occupied territories--a force equivalent to more than three infantry brigades and characterized by Rabin as “a tremendous number”--the embattled prime minister sought to regain the political as well as the military initiative.

“We will fight terrorism with all our strength . . . but we know that, if there is a chance for a resolution (of the Arab-Israeli conflict), it is in the negotiations,” Rabin told Israeli newspaper editors in Tel Aviv in a nationally broadcast address. “Nothing will deter the government or myself from our determination to continue on the path that we have begun.”

Describing the deployments as the largest in years, military sources said nearly a quarter of the reinforcements were moved overnight into the West Bank city of Hebron, south of Jerusalem, where Jewish settlers and Palestinian residents have repeatedly clashed.

Angry protests continued in Jerusalem and around the country, however. Thousands of demonstrators gathered outside Rabin’s official residence in central Jerusalem on Wednesday night to demand that the government abrogate the agreement with the PLO because of Palestinian terrorist attacks.

Rebuked on Tuesday by President Ezer Weizman for failing to keep a strong constituency for the peace agreement, Rabin reiterated his determination to implement the accord on Palestinian self-government. But he also stressed his commitment to Israeli security, including the safety of the 125,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“The last thing I want is terrorism--both because of what it is and what it does and because of the political ramifications it can have during this sensitive period,” Rabin said. “The only limitation on the defense forces is that they act within the law.”

But another Jewish settler was shot and seriously wounded Wednesday by two Palestinian youths in Bethlehem as he and his wife shopped at a hardware store. The youths fled toward a nearby refugee camp.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said it carried out the attack to demonstrate its rejection of the agreement on self-government.

“We tell Rabin and his settlers’ entourage: Our bullets will chase you wherever you are, and all your cowardly army deployments . . . will not help you,” the group declared in a leaflet distributed in Bethlehem.

Since Israel and the PLO reached the agreement three months ago, 18 Israelis and 37 Palestinians have been killed, according to reports by Israeli authorities and human rights groups.

Looking toward the preliminary stage of Palestinian self-government, scheduled to begin Monday, Rabin pumped the thousands more combat troops, army reservists and paramilitary border police into the most troubled areas of the West Bank.

He deployed most of the additional forces around vulnerable Jewish settlements and at confrontation points between Israelis and Palestinians in an effort to halt the cycle of terrorist killings and revenge attacks that have heightened tension recently.

Israel’s forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are now about four times greater than those deployed to defend the country’s northern border with Lebanon, Rabin said, giving figures--usually a military secret--that indicated there are 12,000 to 14,000 troops in the occupied territories.

Israeli officials declined to provide figures for the additional forces, noting only that an infantry company in the Israeli army has a nominal strength of 120 people but usually is about 100. Among the additional troops were units of women trained in riot control who were brought in for use in expected protests by female settlers.

Fistfights broke out Wednesday evening between right-wing Israelis and Palestinians as the Jews marched through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, shouting “Death to the Arabs!” and “Slaughter the Arabs!” and smashing some shops and stands. Police, trying to break up the fights, found themselves battling Arabs and Jews at the same time.

In Mea Shearim, Jerusalem’s ultra-religious neighborhood, police clubbed Orthodox Jews who set tires and trash bins on fire to protest the wave of terrorist attacks. Earlier, police dispersed Palestinian demonstrators on Salah el Din Street, the main thoroughfare of Arab East Jerusalem, where opponents of the peace agreement were burning tires and blocking traffic.

Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin told a news conference that he expects the violence to subside with Palestinian self-rule, which is due to begin in four days under the accord that Israel signed with the PLO in September.

“I believe that once Palestinians are controlling Gaza and (the) Jericho (district on the West Bank), they will be able to control terrorism also, but I’m not sure,” Beilin said. “If violence continues, if--God forbid--terrorism continues in the same dimensions in the coming months, I think that the failure of this agreement will be obvious.”

Rabin said radical Palestinian groups, such as the Islamic Resistance Movement and the Popular Front, have changed their tactics in recent weeks and now are aiming their attacks on Israeli civilians, rather than soldiers, in an effort to turn Israelis against the agreement.

“With the huge forces that the Israeli Defense Forces are investing, and at the cost of training exercises and courses, we are coping,” Rabin said. “. . . Maintaining security in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza is the security priority today. That’s where most of the terrorism is.”