3 Palestinians Die in Hebron Violence

Two Jewish students opened fire with Uzi submachine guns in downtown Hebron on Tuesday, fatally shooting a 24-year-old Palestinian and sparking hours of riots against Israeli soldiers that left two more Palestinians dead and about 100 wounded.

Israelis and Palestinians offered conflicting accounts of the shooting in the polarized West Bank city. Israeli officials said the yeshiva students, who study in Hebron’s small Jewish community and carry army-issue weapons, claimed to have been attacked by a group of Palestinians and to have fired in self-defense.

Palestinians who allegedly witnessed the shooting on a street of Arab shops charged that the Israelis fired without provocation.

The shooting resulted in one of the worst days of violence in three weeks of Israeli-Palestinian clashes that began after Israel broke ground on a new Jewish neighborhood in historically Arab East Jerusalem.

The confrontations in Hebron unfolded as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned from Washington, where he and President Clinton failed to find a solution to the impasse in the Mideast peace process.

Palestinian officials said they will send a high-level delegation to Washington on Thursday, most likely headed by negotiator Mahmoud Abbas.

U.S. officials in Washington appealed for calm in Hebron, and Clinton repeated his position that both sides must take steps to get themselves back to the bargaining table--an indication that he was not pressing either side.

“I want these parties to do what they have to do to get this process up and going again,” Clinton said.

Israel Radio reported this morning that during their meeting, Netanyahu rejected Clinton’s proposal that Israel freeze settlement construction during peace negotiations.

The Palestinians blamed Netanyahu for Tuesday’s violence, much as Netanyahu has blamed Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat for three suicide bombings since March 21. In one of those incidents, a bomb killed three Israeli women in a Tel Aviv cafe; in the others, two bombers in the Gaza Strip missed their targets.

“I think this is a crime, and it comes as a result of Netanyahu’s policies,” said Jibril Rajoub, chief of the Palestinian Preventive Security forces in the West Bank, about the initial shooting on Tuesday.

The shooting occurred about 10 a.m. on a street that runs from Hebron’s Arab vegetable market past a fortified Jewish housing complex and through a block of Arab shops, ending at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a site holy to Jews and Muslims.

Afterward, Israeli military police rescued the yeshiva students from a mob of angry Palestinians throwing what one soldier described as “everything that wasn’t nailed down. Chairs, stones. . . .”

Israel slapped a curfew on Arab residents in the about 20% of Hebron still under Israeli control, and took the 20-year-old students of the Shavei Hebron Yeshiva into police custody.

The gunmen were identified by a spokesman for Hebron’s Jewish community as Tomer Dill and Zeev Munk.

Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, head of the Israel Defense Forces central command, arrived on the scene hours later and said the youths had told police they were “attacked by Palestinians in this alley. They claimed to feel their lives were in danger and fired. The whole incident is under investigation.”

Dayan said the two Israelis were “slightly injured,” but he would not confirm charges by Jewish settlers and a police report that the students had been doused with tear gas or some kind of acid before they fired their weapons.

Palestinian security chief Rajoub called that allegation “a lie.”

The victim of the shooting, Assem Rashid Arafi, 24, died of a single gunshot to the chest at close range, according to the emergency room surgeon who received the body at Hebron’s Alia Hospital.

After the killing, hundreds of protesters began throwing rocks and firebombs at Israeli troops, who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets in a street fight that lasted more than five hours.

A 15-year-old Palestinian boy, Yacoub Joulani, was struck in the head with a rubber bullet and died in surgery at Ahli Hospital. A 24-year-old protester, Assaid Nadir, was hit by a rubber bullet that traveled through his eye and into his brain. He was rushed from Hebron to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, where he died later in the day.

Nearly 100 other protesters were wounded, as were five Israeli soldiers and nine Palestinian police officers who tried to contain the crowd.

Imad Jhafi, a 23-year-old Palestinian police officer, was among those who poured into Alia Hospital hobbling or on army litters. Jhafi’s shirt was bloodied, and he wore a bandage around his forehead, where a rubber bullet had just missed his eye.

“We were pushing the youths back [from the soldiers]. We were afraid they would be hurt and were surprised by the [Israeli] shooting,” Jhafi said.

He said the fighting was more intense than it had been on previous days, but he did not see the clashes as part of a general uprising like the six-year intifada that preceded the 1993 peace accord.

“I don’t think the intifada is coming back. I don’t think the return of the intifada would be good because we have entered into a peace process. We should continue in this process,” Jhafi said.

But Zain Jabari, a 30-year-old protester who was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet, said it remained to be seen if there would be another intifada.

“It might happen because of Jabal Abu Ghneim,” Jabari said, referring to the Arabic name for the hill in East Jerusalem where Israel is building its new Har Homa neighborhood.

Wincing with pain, the laborer added, “If the Netanyahu government wants an intifada, we’re ready. If it wants peace, we’re also ready.”

As the rioting subsided, hundreds of Palestinians marched in the funeral procession of the first shooting victim, Arafi. Uniformed Palestinian police carried the flag-draped body and honored him with a 21-gun salute.

When Palestinian Transportation Minister Ali Qawasmeh tried to speak, the crowd shouted him down, vowing revenge and yelling, “Let the olive branch fall and the gun rise!”

Hebron has long been a flash point between Israelis and Palestinians. About 450 Jews live in the center of town among more than 100,000 Arabs, and their quarter is an armed camp.

Noam Arnon, a spokesman for the Jewish community, blamed Tuesday’s shooting by the yeshiva students on the climate of increased violence in the last few weeks--since the groundbreaking at Har Homa--and on what he called “the decision of Arabs around us to destroy the Jewish community.”