High Noon

Tensions spawn new violence

It was almost midday, and a score of Arab students had gathered for lunch in a rocky field behind the Islamic College at Hebron, a city of 70,000 in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Suddenly two gunmen, their faces masked by checked red-and-white Arab kaffiyehs, darted through an opening in a stone wall and opened fire on the group. As horrified students and teachers rushed for shelter, the attackers sprayed the four-story college building with bullets. Before retreating to a waiting car, they lobbed a grenade through the front door and fired indiscriminately into another group of students in a nearby parking lot. The terror lasted no more than seven minutes, but it left three dead and 33 injured.

Though the attackers made every effort to conceal their identities, suspicion immediately centered on fanatic Jewish settlers. The apparent motive: to obtain revenge for the murder of Aharon Gross, 18, an American emigrant who was stabbed three weeks earlier as he was waiting for a bus near the market in Hebron's old Jewish quarter. So far, no one has been arrested for Gross's murder, but witnesses said his assailants were Arabs.

Faced with contradictory eyewitness reports about the attack at the Islamic College, the Israeli authorities could not be sure the attackers were Jewish. They said that they would also investigate other possibilities--equally without proof: the masked gunmen were Muslim fundamentalists or members of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who might have attacked the college to embarrass Israel and exacerbate Arab-Jewish tensions. Prime Minister Menachem Begin termed the attack a "loathsome crime." Brigadier General Benyamin Ben-Eliezer, coordinator of Israeli operations in the occupied territories, declared, "We will spare no effort and do whatever has to be done in order to find the murderers."

In an effort to prevent further violence, the Israeli government dispatched reinforcements of border police and paratroopers to Hebron. A 24-hr, curfew was imposed. Within minutes of the announcement, Hebron's merchants rolled down the iron shutters in front of their shops, and the streets were soon deserted. But violent demonstrations broke out elsewhere in the West Bank. In Nablus, a young Arab woman was killed when protesters clashed with Israeli soldiers. At Bir Zeit University, Israeli troops fired tear gas canisters, plastic bullets and finally real ammunition at 300 rock-throwing Arab students, wounding four. As Palestinian leaders in the West Bank called for a three-day general strike, Jews and Arabs alike feared that the Hebron killings would set off a new cycle of violence in the tense territory. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.