Palestinians Bury Dead Amid Fresh Bloodshed

After burying four Palestinians shot dead the day before in clashes with Israeli troops, the angry young men of this West Bank city began the long hike down the main road out of town Saturday, toward the Israeli checkpoint where their comrades were killed.

Leaders may meet and talk of cease-fires and negotiations, the men said. But what matters is what happens every day here, where hundreds of Palestinians face off against Israeli soldiers, convinced that these mismatched confrontations will somehow secure an independent Palestinian state.

Saturday was the first of two “days of rage” that militant Palestinians called to coincide with an emergency Arab summit in Cairo. Protesters were encouraged to march on Israeli positions and confront troops. In Nablus, the older ones brandished guns. The younger ones carried slingshots.

The marchers claimed to be happy to be trudging to the spot where so many friends had been injured or killed in three weeks of clashes. Happy to be running the risk of leaving in one of the two ambulances parked nearby.

Even by the gruesome standards set during the past three weeks, which have left more than 118 people dead and more than 2,000 wounded, Saturday was a bloody day in Israel and the Palestinian territories. According to Palestinian reports, at least four more Palestinians were shot dead and more than 200 were injured.

A 13-year-old Gaza Strip boy was shot in the head and reported in critical condition in a Gaza hospital Saturday night, not expected to live. Clashes had erupted in three locations in Gaza and in Hebron, Tulkarm, Nablus, Janin and Ramallah in the West Bank. A French reporter, Jacques Marie Bourget, was shot in a lung and seriously injured while covering the riots in Ramallah.

On Israel’s northern border, meanwhile, the Israeli army reported that a man believed to be a Palestinian was killed trying to cross from Lebanon into Israel. An army spokesman said guns and an Islamic flag were found near the body. The Lebanese Muslim militia Hezbollah denied that the man was a member of its organization, which fought a guerrilla war to end Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon.

And even as Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat told Arab leaders in Cairo that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, thousands of Jewish settlers demonstrated outside Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s house, calling for the army to use more force against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Barak also came under attack from senior members of his Cabinet, who sharply criticized him for saying Friday that Israel may take a “timeout” from peace negotiations if violence in the Palestinian-controlled territories does not diminish after the Arab summit ends today.

“The prime minister cannot decide unilaterally on a timeout,” Justice Minister Yossi Beilin said. “Such a decision . . . should be received by the whole Cabinet, and I hope that it would oppose it.”

In Ramallah, Marwan Barghouti, the West Bank leader of Arafat’s Fatah faction, called a news conference to say that what he termed the “peaceful intifada” will continue. Barghouti insisted that the protests have enhanced peace prospects.

“The Palestinian people, through this intifada, did not give up the choice of peace. The vast majority of the Palestinian people still support the peace. This is an intifada for peace [but] an intifada against the Israeli peace,” said Barghouti, whose position makes him Arafat’s chief field lieutenant in the West Bank.

The Nablus fighters, however, said they are uninterested in peace and in efforts to quell the violence.

Thousands of Palestinians, many waving flags and brandishing weapons, joined Saturday’s funerals. After the bodies were buried, hundreds of young men headed for the checkpoint. A truck blasting verses from the Islamic holy book, the Koran, that extol the virtues of dying for Islam drove up and down the street, winding its way slowly through the column of men.

As the black smoke of burning tires billowed into the air and dozens of young men began chanting and throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops, 17-year-old Wisam Titi said he knew exactly why he was joining the fray.

“We are going to defend our homeland,” Titi said. “We don’t want the Jews to stay in our land and kill us one by one. We want to get rid of them.”

The soldiers, Titi said confidently, “are cowards. They are afraid of stones. They are afraid of death. We are not afraid to die.”

Mohammed and Raed, two Fatah members who refused to give their last names, drove up and down the street in a Volkswagen Golf covered with martyrs’ portraits. The Palestinian flag and that of the Fatah Shabiba, the faction’s youth wing, flew from the car’s windows, and nationalist songs boomed from its sound system.

The two 21-year-olds said they grew up together in the nearby Balata refugee camp. Mohammed raised his shirt to show the scars of bullet wounds on his chest and hip. He was shot as an 8-year-old, he said, while throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Now he and Raed drive around town encouraging youths to join the fight.

“We want Israel to evacuate from our land,” Mohammed said. “We want all the land occupied in 1967,” when Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem during the Middle East War that June. “President Arafat cannot control this. The people are in a revolutionary mood. When we see the Israelis kill our people, we will not stop this fighting. The people want war. They are ready to offer hundreds of martyrs.”

As the two young men spoke, troops opened fire on the demonstrators, and the ambulances went into action, carrying wounded to a nearby hospital.

At the confrontation point, reporter Mohammed Daraghmah said the high number of Palestinian casualties in the past three weeks has been partially due to Israel’s pullout from every West Bank city except Hebron, where it divides control with the Palestinian Authority.

In the 1980s, when Israel still occupied the entire West Bank, Daraghmah said, youths would throw stones at patrolling soldiers and then melt into the Nablus casbah. Now, he said, “they must walk five kilometers [three miles] from the center of the city to find the soldiers. The confrontations are in the open, so it’s easy for the soldiers to shoot. This is very bad for us.”

A young man who identified himself only as Mohammed said he fears that all the sacrifices may be for nothing.

“I am very worried for this,” he said. “The [Islamic militant group] Hamas says that it is better to explode bombs among the Israelis than to throw stones here and be shot.”

Still, he said, he comes to the barricades “because it creates the image of Israel being a fascist entity and maybe has a negative impact on the Israeli economy and fuels a revolution among Arab people against their regimes.”

Besides, he said as the shooting started, “every revolution must pay the price of freedom. We believe that our dead are in paradise and their dead are in hell.”

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Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson in Ramallah contributed to this report.