The Washington Post, by Glenn Frankel

It was a typical week in this densely populated refugee camp. There were Israeli soldiers and Arab stone throwers playing cat-and-mouse games through the winding, garbage-strewn alleyways. There were rubber bullets and fiberglass billy clubs on one side and slingshots, bottles and concrete blocks on the other. And, as always, there was tear gas.

For two days, Ikkram Said, a slender, 27-year-old woman who was four months pregnant, said she could smell fumes wafting into her courtyard from outside. Even with the windows closed, she said, her eyes stung, she coughed constantly and had trouble breathing. Then one day she noticed blood when she went to the toilet and became frightened.

She had a friend drive her to the camp's United Nations health clinic and was advised to go to Shifa Hospital in nearby Gaza City. By the time she got there she had stomach cramps and uterine contractions. Soon after, she miscarried.

Said's story represents another question mark in one of the most troubling, elusive and emotive issues to arise during the 23-week Arab uprising: the effects on the Palestinian population of the Israeli Army's frequent use of tear gas as a nonlethal riot-control weapon.

Palestinian doctors and officials working for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that operates the refugee camps contend there have been more than 1,200 injuries, dozens of miscarriages and at least 11 deaths from tear gas since the uprising began Dec. 9. The Washington-based Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has put deaths at 41 and used that figure in a successful lobbying campaign that last month led the American manufacturer of the gas to suspend sales to Israel.

While they concede they lack hard data and autopsy results to verify many of their claims, these sources contend the weight of circumstantial evidence clearly indicates that tear gas is at least a significant contributing factor in deaths and miscarriages among a refugee camp population that, even in the best of times, is in a precarious state of health.

"There is until now no solid scientific proof, but certainly the accumulated evidence is strongly incriminating," said Dr. Samir Badri, a Palestinian who is UNRWA's chief health officer in the Gaza Strip.

"When you see a woman with no previous history of miscarriages or bleeding, and after exposure to tear gas she bleeds and aborts, you can say safely it is the gas."

Israeli officials contend the Palestinian claims are based on false or unsubstantiated information and are designed to fuel a propaganda crusade that portrays Israel as waging a form of chemical warfare against a hapless civilian population.

"We have not seen any cases where it could be proven by a coroner that anybody has been killed due to exposure to tear gas," said Brig. Gen. Yehuda Danon, the Israeli Army's surgeon general, in a telephone interview, "and we have no scientific evidence that there have been more miscarriages following the use of [tear gas]."

Medical experts say the issue is further complicated by the fact that accurate statistics and unbiased accounts are largely unobtainable in the chaos of civil unrest and military crackdown that has reigned in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip since December.

But within the cross fire of charges and countercharges, interviews with Palestinian, Israeli and American doctors who have first-hand experience with tear gas, a reexamination of several cases, and eyewitness accounts during recent months all point to these facts about the use of tear gas during the uprising:There is no credible evidence to support Palestinian claims that the Israelis are using any gas or toxic chemicals other than the standard chlorobenzylidene malononitrile, known as "CS," manufactured by Federal Laboratories Inc. of Saltzburg, Pa. When properly used outdoors, the gas has limited effects that generally wear off in 15 to 30 minutes.There is, however, much evidence indicating that on numerous occasions soldiers and police have violated the manufacturer's printed warnings by firing the gas into enclosed areas such as rooms or small courtyards. Most experts agree that such misuse of the gas can be harmful, especially to small children, the elderly, pregnant women and people suffering from heart or lung problems.

There is debate over the possible long-term health effects of tear gas and growing concern among human-rights groups and some medical experts about its widespread use in countries including Israel, South Korea and Panama.Health conditions in the squalid, overcrowded refugee camps of Gaza have deteriorated dramatically in recent months due to disruptions of medical services and child feeding programs caused both by Palestinian violence and Israeli military restrictions. As a result, the population is more vulnerable to many kinds of health hazards, one of which is exposure to tear gas.

Upon close examination, some of the U.N. and Palestinian claims appear groundless. After a visit to Gaza last month, UNRWA health director John Hiddlestone told a press conference in Vienna about an incident in which two young Palestinians were beaten by soldiers and confined in a room where a reddish aerosal spray was used. "The room was then shut and after an hour or so two dead bodies were removed," said Hiddlestone, who said soldiers apparently had used "some very toxic nerve gas."

Hiddlestone was talking about the death of Basel Yazuri, age 18, who was killed Jan. 8 in the Rafah refugee camp, according to UNRWA officials. But Jerusalem Post reporter Bradley Burston, who visited Yazuri's house shortly after the incident, said that besides the red powder on the walls and furniture of the room, which apparently came from an Army smoke grenade, there were also multiple bullet holes indicating someone had sprayed the room with an automatic rifle.

UNRWA's own report on the incident states Yazuri died from bullet wounds and that there was no second fatality. The Army contends Yazuri was shot dead while attacking a soldier with a knife. Arab witnesses at the scene claimed he was badly beaten before being shot, and the question of whether Yazuri's death was justifiable homicide remains open. But no one except Hiddlestone says he was gassed.

In camps such as Jabaliya, tear gas has become part of everyday life as well as a key element in the mythology of the Palestinian uprising. Children turn the spent metal canisters into toys or wear them proudly as necklaces. Dozens of canisters are hung defiantly from utility lines throughout the camp. Almost every house, it seems, boasts a collection of one or more of the thin tin projectiles or grenade-style rubber containers.

There are no figures available on how much tear gas Israeli troops have used since December, but the use is widespread. Soldiers have fired gas canisters from rifles, hurled grenades by hand and dumped 30-inch-long cans from helicopters. Despite printed warnings on the canisters that the gas is "for outdoor use only" and "may cause severe injury if not used in accordance with this warning," soldiers pursuing alleged rioters have fired tear gas into houses, stores, clinics and even, on occasion, into hospitals.

Even now, at a time when the frequency of violent incidents and fatalities appears to be dropping, Christine Dabbagh, UNRWA's information officer in Gaza, says she gets daily reports of injuries including tear-gassing from Jabaliya and other camps. On May 21, for example, UNRWA's Jabaliya clinic reported treating 11 people for gas, including Said, who later miscarried at Shifa Hospital. The following day the report listed six tear-gas victims, two of whom later miscarried.

Altogther, doctors at Shifa Hospital, which serves most of the northern half of the Gaza Strip, say they treated 378 miscarriage cases between December 1987 and February 1988, the first three months of the uprising, compared to 335 during the same period a year earlier. UNRWA health director Badri says he tried to compile statistics to do a similar comparison at the Rafah refugee camp, but the numbers showed no significant increase.

The causes of miscarriages remain elusive because even in normal times, the estimated rate of miscarriages runs as high as 20 percent. Ikkram Said, for example, had a miscarriage and then bore three children before her latest pregnancy. It is impossible to know in retrospect exactly why she aborted this time. Besides her physical symptoms, doctors say her sense of fear after being exposed to tear gas could have been a factor.

Similarly, the death of a three-year-old girl in Gaza City last Friday remains uncertain. Local residents attributed it to tear gas. But the Army said the girl had not shown symptoms of tear gas inhalation when treated at a local hospital and said her body was spirited away by family members before an autopsy could be performed.

Dr. Issa Satti, director and chief surgeon at Ramallah Hospital in the West Bank, recalled last Feb. 20, when soldiers fired two CS gas canisters into the maternity recovery ward. There were five women and four babies in the ward at the time who were quickly evacuated, Satti said, after which he tried to enter the room to remove the canisters.

"I thought I would just throw them out the window, but I could hardly get into the room," Satti recalled. "It was so concentrated. I started to cough, and then I couldn't breathe. Even 24 hours later you couldn't enter the room."

Satti, who is one of the West Bank's best known and most respected physicians, said he has concluded after months of watching soldiers use tear gas in Ramallah that "when used properly outdoors, I think it's harmless. But we've had people who have had gas fired into their homes. Someone kept inside long enough could certainly die."

An Army spokeswoman said soldiers were instructed to use tear gas only in open areas and that other uses of the gas were in violation of orders. She noted that the Army had taken pains to choose a form of tear gas that would not prove harmful to its own soldiers because sudden wind changes often expose them to its effects.

Brig. Gen. Danon said the Army had relied upon two reports in 1969 and 1971 by the Himsworth Royal Commission into the medical and toxicological effects of tear-gas use in Northern Ireland. Both reports indicated that CS gas was the safest and least toxic and had the least long-term health effects, said Danon.

The Army surgeon general conceded that health conditions in Gaza are poor but said many factors associated with the uprising were to blame. The United Nations' supplemental feeding clinics for pregnant women and children have functioned only sporadically due to civil violence and to military curfews. Sewage systems and running water have broken down in many places and have not been repaired. Garbage collection is sporadic at best.

"All of these are far more important in terms of their effect on the health of the population than the occasional use of riot-control agents such as tear gas," he said.

But Dr. Jonathan E. Fine, an internist who is executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, a Boston-based rights group, contended that the Himsworth reports had drastically underestimated the harmful effects of CS gas.

"There's a tremendous under-appreciation of the dangers of tear gas," said Fine in a telephone interview. "In my opinion it's a misnomer to call this stuff 'tear gas.' It's really poison gas . . . . "

A team of four American physicians from Fine's group who visited the West Bank and Gaza in February said in their report that they could not substantiate claims of an increase in the incidence of miscarriages due to tear gas. Even so, Fine warned, Israel should not take the safety of tear gas for granted.

"I have to question both the logic and the morality of what the Army surgeon general is saying," said Fine. "It's a double standard he's applying here. Would Israel use the same gas on its own children? I don't believe so."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Misunderstandings, Fear Blamed in Clash That Killed 3

Perhaps the saddest part of the story, as each side tells it, is that no one set out to kill anyone. The young Jewish settlers were taking advantage of a warm spring morning for a holiday hike through hills and valleys they consider their birthright. The Arab villagers were tending their fields and, ultimately, defending land they consider theirs.

Yet when it was all over last Wednesday afternoon, two young Arab men and a 15-year-old Israeli girl lay dead, and another Israeli lay battered into unconsciousness.

Each side was confronted by its own worst nightmare that morning. For the Palestinians, it was a Jewish settler, a warm M16 in his hands, stalking into their village after killing one of their young men. For the Israelis, it was the sight of hundreds of angry Arabs, some throwing stones, others brandishing knives, gathering on rooftops and in the streets in a growing fury.

It was all "a misunderstanding," Gen. Dan Shomron, the Israeli Army's chief of staff, told reporters later.

The Israeli girl, Tirzah Porat, was the first Israeli civilian to be killed since the Palestinian uprising began more than four months ago. But what happened at Beita -- and why -- was not so much a watershed as an illustration of the fear, hatred and misunderstanding that are elemental forces in the conflict.

Despite its attempt to defuse the situation, the Army appears to have compounded the misunderstanding. Shomron and other officials first said Porat had been stoned to death by the villagers. They then withheld, until after her politically charged funeral, autopsy results indicating she had actually been shot in the head with the M16 of one the settler guards.

The Army says it is still determining whether the bullet was fired by one of the guards accidentally or by a villager who seized the gun.

After the deaths, the Army sealed off Beita, rounded up all males between ages 15 and 60, demolished 14 houses and bulldozed seven acres of olive trees. Six of those allegedly involved have been ordered expelled.

The Army took these actions without trying or convicting anyone and, in the case of the house demolitions and the uprooting of the trees, allowing no time for legal appeal. Soldiers also shot and killed a 19-year-old man who they said ignored their orders to halt while fleeing the village.

In blowing up the houses, Army sappers caused visible, sometimes extensive, damage to at least a dozen nearby houses. And in one case, the Army concedes, it destroyed the house of a family who had helped the Jewish youngsters.

The men in that family, Hafez Bani Shamseh, 70, and three of his sons, sat on a neighbor's porch this week and discussed what had happened last Wednesday and why. In the distance they could see the collapsed rubble of their house, which they said had been in the family for nearly a century.

Some of them were angry, some resigned. "That's the way of the world," said Nizzam Bani Shamseh, 28, who works for a construction firm in Israel. "There's a war between Jews and Arabs and we were in the middle trying to help people."

The following account is taken from members of Hafez Bani Shamseh's family who said they witnessed the incident, from the Israeli teen-agers who appeared at a press conference in Jerusalem Sunday, and from military officials who insisted on anonymity.

There are a few facts not in dispute about that morning when 16 Israeli teen-agers, most from the nearby settlement of Elon Moreh, and two armed guards started a nature hike through the winding trails east of the village. They had stopped for a break in a dry river bed when youngsters from the area began throwing rocks at them. Some of the Arabs said they had heard that the settlers roughed up a young shepherd. The teen-agers denied this.

One of the Israeli guards was Romam Aldubi, 26, a religious militant who had been banned from the West Bank city of Nablus for six months last year by the Army for his involvement in several shooting incidents. The other, Menachem Ilan, 55, had been convicted in 1984 of destroying evidence and obstructing justice in connection with the killing of an 11-year-old Arab girl by another Elon Moreh settler.

According to Army investigators, the two escorts took only one magazine of bullets each for their automatic weapons and a walkie-talkie tuned only to an Elon Moreh frequency and unusable in the valley around Beita.

When the stones began to fly, Aldubi fired into the air, the Jewish teen-agers said. Then a young Arab man approached the group. Some of the Israelis contended that the man tried to grab Aldubi's M16. Arab witnesses said the man merely sought to persuade the group to leave the area quietly. In any case, Aldubi shot the man at close range, killing him.

Villagers came out to retrieve the victim and rushed him to a Nablus hospital. Hundreds of villagers arrived from nearby fields and from Beita, many wielding farm tools.

Some of the villagers contended that the settlers could have fled east or north. But the teen-agers said they were surrounded and compelled by the Arabs to walk to Beita.

Upper Beita is built on the side of a hill, its houses crammed together along narrow, winding pathways. It is easy to sense the claustrophobia both groups must have felt when the settlers arrived with the villagers in their wake, choking the streets and climbing atop roofs.

"People saw him [Aldubi] coming in with his gun," recalled Taysir Bani Shamseh, brother-in-law of the dead man. "He already had killed someone outside, and when we saw him coming we thought he was coming to kill us."

Rami Hoffman, 17, one of the Jewish teen-agers, said villagers were shouting, "Kill the Jews!" When they got near the village, he said, "the women and children began to come out, with axes, pruning hooks and metal tools. . . . They constantly tried to get to Romam and grab his gun. We saw their eyes on the rifle, and they were trying all the time to push in and get to it."

The villagers were divided about what to do, according to Azzam Bani Shamseh, 26. "Some people wanted to wave them through and get them out of the village, some people wanted to hit them. Some wanted to take them to the mosque so that the Army could come and arrest them."

The mob halted the teen-agers, who formed a tight ring around Aldubi, outside the Bani Shamseh house. Azzam Bani Shamseh said he pushed into the crowd and tried, with a few older residents, to escort the Jewish teen-agers out of the area. But meanwhile, he said, a car returned to the village with the dead man's body.

At that point, Azzam Bani Shamseh said, "the whole village became agitated." Rocks began flying again, people began closing in on the group. Someone grabbed one Israeli teen-ager and hit him, pulling the camera from around his neck and smashing it. The mother and sister of the dead man moved around behind Aldubi, investigators say, and smashed him on the head with rocks.

The Jewish settlers contend Aldubi fired only once in the air at this point. But Azzam Bani Shamseh said he saw Aldubi firing blindly and heard four or five shots. At least two Palestinians were hit, and one of them later died. Tirzah Porat also fell wounded, he said.

Other Arabs continued to batter Aldubi with rocks and sticks. Someone apparently threw an explosive device that scattered shrapnel around the area, wounding some of the teen-agers. Then most of the attackers fled. Two men took Aldubi's and Ilan's weapons, which were later smashed. Army investigators said they have no evidence that an Arab fired either gun.

When first interviewed after the incident, the Israeli teen-agers said they thought Porat had been killed by stones. But three days later, after long discussions with their parents and settlement leaders, some of the youngsters told a press conference that they had seen a masked Arab fire a Kalashnikov assault rifle from a roof.

The villagers said there was no Kalashnikov, and Army investigators said the bullet that killed Porat entered her head from below at close range and exited through the top of her skull, making it impossible that she was shot from a roof.

Rami Hoffman said he and other youngsters tried to revive Porat with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Azzam Bani Shamseh pushed on her chest to try to revive her heartbeat. Other members of his family brought water to some of the Israeli teen-agers to wash blood from wounds. Another family took three girls to their house and hid them.

"People were not after the kids," said Azzam Bani Shamseh. "People were after the guard. If they had wanted to they could have killed them all."

But when the Army came, Bani Shamseh, like hundreds of other young men, fled Beita. Some returned after helicopters dropped leaflets warning that they and those sheltering them would be punished.

Azzam Bani Shamseh came back Friday to find the Army had already demolished his house. Hafez Bani Shamseh said he tried to explain to an Army captain that his sons had aided the youngsters, but, "He said I was lying."

Azzam was held for a day, tied up and blindfolded with dozens of other young men. His photo was shown to some of the Israeli teen-agers, who identified him as one who had tried to help them. He was then released, and the military governor of Nablus apologized for the destruction of his house and promised compensation.

Shomron said the houses were destroyed and other punitive measures taken so that both Arabs and Israelis would see immediate results.

Azzam Bani Shamseh called the Army's action "a crime." But he and many villagers expressed no anger that soldiers have kept Beita sealed off. They fear the settlers more than the Army, they said. And when the Army leaves, many expect the settlers to return.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Analogy Between Countries Elicits Bitter Response in Jerusalem

Shlomo Avineri, a prominent Hebrew University political scientist close to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, was recently discussing the six-weeks of Palestinian protest in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip when he raised a specter that sends shivers down the spines of many Israeli Jews.

Israel is strong enough militarily to hold on to the territories indefinitely despite Arab resistance, Avineri said. But if it chose to do so, he warned, "the next 15 years will look more like the last weeks . . . and by the year 2000 we will look into the mirror and we will see South Africa."

There are critics who claim that Avineri's vision of the future has come to pass already on the streets of Gaza. The rise of a new generation of angry young men challenging the might of an army with stones and bottles, the shootings and the beatings, the increasing restrictions on press coverage -- all of it, they contend, eerily echoes similar scenes in the black townships of South Africa.

So, too, does the image of a government that has resorted to a hard-line security stance to quell widespread civil disorder because it is unwilling, or unable, to take the risk of seeking a political solution.

Of all the charges leveled during the recent violence, none has stung the Israeli government more or produced more bitter reaction than the claim that Israel is becoming the South Africa of the Middle East. It is an analogy that, in the eyes of Israeli officials, not only equates this nation with a country that they find morally repugnant -- although they have had close ties with it in the past -- but also challenges the very right of the Jewish state to exist.

Israeli officials see the claim as part of a propaganda war waged by Israel's Arab enemies and abetted to some extent by the western news media. ABC News, for example, in two recent programs drew the comparison with film showing striking resemblances between scenes of fighting in South Africa and here and between the hard-line rhetoric of South African President Pieter W. Botha and that of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

The aim of such analogies, officials here contend, is to resurrect the concept first given voice in the 1975 U.N. General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism -- that Israel, like South Africa, is a pariah state outside the comity of nations and that it should be quarantined and delegitimized. Such isolation is especially feared here because, unlike South Africa, Israel is a small state, relatively bereft of natural resources and mineral wealth, that cannot stand alone.

"It's a disgusting and unfair comparison," said a senior Foreign Ministry official, "and there is more than a little anti-Semitism behind it. It's made by people who sit behind their desks in London and Washington smiling at our distress."

To help dispel the analogy, Israel last year cut back on longstanding close commercial and diplomatic ties with South Africa. More recently, the Foreign Ministry issued a confidential guidance paper to its embassies and consulates abroad outlining what it sees as the main differences between the two countries.

To assess the similarities and differences between South Africa and Israel is to step into a mine field of politics, history and emotion. "South Africa is a state of mind," said Israeli social scientist Meron Benvenisti, suggesting that the facts do not matter as much as the feeling that the two countries are becoming more alike.

Nonetheless, the question lingers, and it has become a topic of increasing controversy here. Among those drawn into the debate are government officials, academics and journalists -- including this reporter, who between 1983 and 1986 was The Washington Post's southern Africa correspondent.

Both nations came of age in 1948, when Israel gained its independence as a Jewish state and South Africa saw the triumph of Afrikaner nationalism in a watershed parliamentary election. But there, most Israelis argue, the similarities of history abruptly end.

While Jews were building a democratic state based on Zionist principles, the Afrikaners were constructing a system of white domination known as apartheid. It was a complete ideology, a total system that attempted to justify white-minority rule on economic, political, religious and even moral grounds.

South Africa's blacks were disenfranchised, confined to bleak rural homelands or overcrowded townships and ultimately denied citizenship in the land of their birth. Meanwhile, Israel's Arab minority had parliamentary representation and full civil rights, at least on paper. Arabic is an official language of the parliament, alongside Hebrew.

Then came June 1967 and Israel's triumph in the Six Day War, when it fought for its very existence after Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia moved forces toward its border and Egypt sent thousands of troops into the Sinai. To maintain a crucial margin of security against future invasions, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip with its 1.2 million Arab residents. It was to be temporary. But 20 years have passed, and Egypt is the only Arab country to have made peace with Israel. The occupation remained, and its Palestinian subjects have only the limited rights that military rule bestows.

The result, critics say, bears more than a surface resemblance to South Africa. Both governments operate under sweeping security regulations that give them broad powers against opponents far beyond those generally accepted in western democracies. Both nations maintain elaborate security police forces and networks of informers. Allegations of torture, secret files and other trappings of a police state can be found in both states despite the fact that they both boast a tradition of an independent judiciary.

"The lesson is that when one people controls another people, regardless of the reasons -- and our reasons are very different from those of the South Africans -- you end up doing the same things," said Dan Sagir, a journalist for the newspaper Haaretz who was based in South Africa until he was expelled by the Pretoria government in 1986.

Israelis argue that the reasons for the occupation -- the continuing state of war between Israel and the Arabs, the ongoing threat to Israel's survival -- explain and justify their actions in the occupied areas in ways that apartheid cannot be justified. South African blacks do not seek to destroy the state, the Israelis contend, but to become equal partners in it, and they have shown no desire to drive whites into the sea.

Palestinians, by contrast, do not want to become part of Israel but rather seek their own state, one that Israelis believe threatens Israel's existence and certainly its Jewish character.

But white Afrikaners argue that their survival, too, is under threat. Black rule, they contend, could destroy the country's economic system and mean the end of democracy for the whites who presently enjoy it. They say it also could mean cultural suicide for Afrikaners who fear that once they lose political control, they would forfeit control over institutions such as schools, churches and businesses.

Ultimately, for Afrikaners as well as Jews, it is their ethnic identity and their homeland that they believe is at stake. Neither will talk to his enemy -- Pretoria refuses to negotiate with the African National Congress, Jerusalem shuns the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Both employ the peoples they rule over as pools of cheap labor to do their most menial tasks. In Israel's case, Palestinian workers comprise only 6 percent its work force, whereas South Africa's entire economy is built upon the prevalence and use of black labor.

But as Jerusalem Post reporter Hirsh Goodman, himself a South African emigre, points out, the squalid black townships of South Africa were built by the white government to serve as reservoirs of cheap labor, whereas the equally squalid refugee camps of Gaza were constructed by Egypt and other Arab states unwilling to absorb the Palestinians who poured out of Israel in 1948.

Perhaps most important, Palestinians say they experience under occupation the same sense of powerlessness and humiliation that black South Africans must live with. "Any young soldier at a checkpoint from Ramallah to Jerusalem can order me to stop and humiliate me in front of my family," says Ibrahim Karaeen, owner of the Palestine Press Service, the pronationalist news agency based in East Jerusalem.

Now the unrest has created new similarities. As in South Africa, a new generation of disenfranchised Palestinians, believing that they lack any other means to express grievances and fulfill aspirations, disaffected with their old leaders, has taken to the streets in mass protest with a vehemence that has surprised their rulers and even their parents.

Tear gas has the same effect whether it is fired in Soweto or Gaza. But statistics suggest that Israel has a long way to go to catch up to South Africa in the ferocity of either the violence or the suppression of it.

According to the South African Institute of Race Relations, more than 2,300 persons died in South Africa in violence between September 1984 and February 1987 -- although many of these were blacks killed by other blacks. During one three-month period between March and June 1986, blacks were being killed at the rate of more than six per day. By contrast, the official death toll here is 38 Palestinians over a 45-day period -- fewer than one per day. Given the discrepancies in population, the death rates are not dissimilar, but the critical difference is that South Africa sustained a high rate for more than two years.

Pretoria detained nearly 12,000 people in 1985 and as many as 30,000 in 1986, according to figures from the government and the Detainees' Parents Support Committee. The committee says about 32,000 of the two-year total were arrested under emergency regulations and could be held without charge or trial for as long as the emergency continued.

By contrast, about 2,000 Palestinians have been arrested in the past 45 days, and most have either been released or tried and sentenced by military courts. Critics have mocked the trials as summary and unfair -- but at least the sentences that they hand out are of fixed duration.

There is also the contrast between the armies of the two nations. Both had trouble responding in early days to the unrest, and both found that a hard response provoked violent reactions while a soft response was seen by activists as weakness. But analysts say South African police units appeared better trained and better equipped to deal with rioters than Israeli soldiers.

After the early violence, South African police seldom patrolled on foot, moving instead in armored personnel carriers. By contrast, Israeli soldiers patrolled on foot in small units, refusing to wear helmets and often lacking antiriot gear. The financially strapped Israeli Army had chosen not to purchase water cannon and other sophisticated equipment. When trapped, soldiers sometimes felt they had little choice but to open fire with live ammunition.

Both governments have pursued a hard line in response to the violence, and both are led by stolid nationalists in their 70s. But there the political similarities end.

South Africa has been ruled for 40 years by the National Party, which maintains a massive majority in Parliament and suffocates dissent. There are debates and dissenting views within the ruling party, but the face that it shows to the outside world has but one determined expression.

Israel's government, on the other hand, is an uneasy coalition between Prime Minister Shamir's Likud and the more dovish Labor Party of Foreign Minister Peres. The political atmosphere here is loud, impulsive, untidy, disruptive, full of dissonance and dissension -- the tumultuous noise of a functional democracy, even critics concede.

Many here, such as Avineri and Benvenisti, fear for Israel's future. The violence, they say, is helping to solidify the Israeli right while causing turmoil in the Labor Party, whose ideology is much more fuzzy than that of the Likud. The end of the road could be the collapse of Labor and the triumph of the right similar to the collapse of the centrist Union Party in South Africa in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

At the same time, these academics contend, demographics are slowly but steadily leading to an Arab majority population in Israel proper and the territories combined. Israel ultimately will have to surrender the territories to maintain its Jewish character or else deny democracy to an Arab majority. The latter is seen as the "South Africa option."

It is a gloomy scenario and one not accepted by many here. They contend that Israel's essentially democratic character will assert itself and prevent an Israeli version of apartheid from gaining a foothold.

There was a time not long ago when Israeli officials greeted new arrivals from South Africa with a smile and noted that they had come from the one place that had more intractable problems than Israel itself faced.

But South Africa is a broad land with great wealth whose people share a birthright, though not a political vision. Israel has no such wealth to share among its fractious population and no clearcut solutions. And its officials are no longer smiling.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Top Israelis Reportedly Approved Slaying of PLO Aide Wazir

Khalil Wazir, number two leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was gunned down by an Israeli commando squad after the assassination was approved by Israel's policy-making inner cabinet, according to informed sources here.

Israel has lowered a curtain of official secrecy over the operation. But with information compiled from a Tunisian investigation and from Israeli sources, it is possible to assemble some of the key pieces in the secret story of how the raid was planned.

The operation was planned and carried out by a combined team from the Mossad spy agency, the Army, Navy and Air Force, but the actual assassination early Saturday morning in Tunis was carried out by a special Army commando unit known in Hebrew as the Sayeret Matkal, sources said. The name translates as "reconnaissance party of the general staff."

The raid was overseen by several senior military commanders in a specially equipped Boeing 707 who were in constant radio contact with the squad on the ground.

The 10-member inner cabinet discussed the assassination twice before approving it, once immediately after last month's terrorist bus hijacking in the Negev desert in which three Israeli civilians were killed and again last Wednesday. No formal vote was taken at the second session, but the only dissenting voice was that of Ezer Weizman, a former defense minister.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who raised objections at the previous session, was silent at the Wednesday meeting, the sources said. Education Minister Yitzhak Navon, who also had objected to the plan, was overseas and did not attend.

Despite the fact that Israel has not publicly acknowledged ordering and carrying out the killing, the assassination has caused widespread elation here and boosted morale both among the public and in the Army, which had been worn down and disheartened by several recent incidents and the grinding rigors of fighting the four-month-long Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories.

Israelis have pointed to the careful planning, efficiency and "humaneness" of the attack -- the fact that only Wazir and three of his bodyguards were killed, while his wife and child were spared -- as proof that when it comes to such operations, Israel is still the world leader.

But the early jubilation, shared by both the liberal left and far right, over the killing of a man branded as a senior Palestinian terrorist, has begun to fade. Some Israelis have warned that the assassination is an artificial quick fix that, on the eve of Israel's troubled 40th anniversary, illustrates the country's inability to find a political solution to the problem of coping with the Palestinians both within and outside its borders.

Such an operation, wrote Yoel Marcus, columnist for the Hebrew daily Haaretz, "is good for our egos, but doesn't deal with the serious problems facing our country." Israel, he warned, is reverting to "the same methods and tools that were appropriate 20, 30, 40 years ago. The Abu Jihad assassination is a symbol of what is happening to us."

At best, these critics contend, the assassination will be a serious short-term blow to the already fragile Middle East peace process. At worst, it could reignite the secret war in which dozens of Palestinian operatives, Israeli diplomats and innocent civilians were gunned down in the 1970s.

For several days, Israel's official silence, enforced by military censorship, was effective in concealing the government's role, even though the modus operandi clearly was Israeli. While the PLO, the Arab states and the Israeli public all knew who had committed the act, the official silence allowed Israel to dodge international condemnation.

But the silence has frayed. Weizman has spoken out against the operation, tacitly acknowledging Israel's role by noting that until last week, Israel for several years had adhered to an unwritten agreement not to attack PLO leaders. "The fact is that we have never done so -- why now?" Weizman asked.

Asked by reporters whether Israel ordered the killing, Weizman replied, "Guess for yourselves."

Even Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, while condemning Weizman's comments, has not been able to restrain himself from broad hints. At a memorial ceremony for Israeli war dead last night, Shamir said, "Let's hope that our enemies will realize and understand that Israel knows how to wage war, and that all those who hurt us will be hurt manifold."

Shamir's only reported direct comment on the assassination came on Sunday when, Israeli radio said, he told Cabinet members at their weekly meeting, "I heard about it on the radio, just like you."

Security officials reportedly have discussed assassinating Wazir for many years, but the operation gained new impetus after the March 7 Negev bus attack, for which Wazir's Fatah military organization claimed responsibility.

The inner cabinet, made up of five senior ministers each from the rival Labor and Likud political blocs in the coalition government, first discussed the issue on the day after the bus hijacking. Security forces were given a yellow light to prepare an attack, sources said, but the final decision was postponed.

Last Wednesday's inner-cabinet discussion took only 30 minutes, sources said. Yossi Ben-Aharon and Yossi Beilin, the senior aides to Shamir and Peres respectively, were asked to leave the room. Weizman raised his objection while Peres reportedly remained silent. "Based on the previous discussion, it was understood he was not crazy about the idea," a source said of Peres.

Those who had originally opposed the plan -- Weizman, Peres and Navon -- are all members of the Labor Party, the more dovish half of Israel's shaky coalition. The other two Labor ministers in the inner cabinet, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Police Minister Haim Bar-Lev, both supported the assassination, according to sources. Shamir, in keeping with past practice on sensitive security matters, did not ask for a show of hands.

The mission had several objectives, sources contend. One was to punish the PLO for the bus attack and send a warning that no Palestinian leader -- even the heavily guarded, security-conscious Wazir -- was safe from retaliation. The other was to deflate the uprising, which had begun spontaneously last December but in which Israeli officials believed Wazir played a major coordinating role in recent months.

The Army was also in need of a boost to its morale and self-image after last November's hang-glider attack in which a lone Palestinian commando killed six Israeli soldiers and injured a dozen others before he was killed.

The Army's image suffered further damage in the March bus attack because the hijackers, after infiltrating into Israel, drove to the site in an Army sedan they seized from three Army officers they ambushed. The officers, on their way to a track meet, were out of uniform and unarmed and fled. They were later severely disciplined.

Three of the Army's top commanders have experience with raids such as the one against Wazir. The chief of staff, Gen. Dan Shomron, led the raid on the Entebbe, Uganda, airport in 1976 that freed a hijacked jetliner. His deputy, Maj. Gen. Ehud Barak, led a 30-member commando squad that killed three major PLO leaders and dozens of Palestinian guerrillas in Beirut in 1973. The commander of that operation, Gen. Amnon Shahak, is now head of military intelligence.

Analysts say the assassination especially fits the strategic thinking of Barak, a commander who favors swift, limited strikes over grand-scale operations.

As in the Beirut raid, a three-man Arabic-speaking Mossad advance team entered Tunis using false Lebanese passports, reconnoitered the area and arranged for rental vehicles for use by the hit team. Some 30 to 40 commandos were ferried to an isolated seashore site in rubber dinghies launched from a missile boat manned by the Navy's seaborne commando force.

Some reports said the attackers were wearing uniforms of the Tunisian National Guard, although this could not be confirmed here.

While the raiders were approaching their target, a Boeing 707 equipped like an American airborne warning and control system aircraft, with sophisticated electronic gear, was flying over the Mediterranean just outside Tunisian air space. The plane was used not only to jam telephone communications around Wazir's home, as Tunisian investigators have charged, but also to monitor and coordinate the entire operation.

Senior military commanders were aboard the plane and a source whose account cannot be confirmed said among those present were Barak, Air Force Commander Avihu Bin-Nun and, possibly, Shahak. The operational commander on the ground has not been identified.

Tunisian officials said the Boeing used a civilian radio signal designated as 4X. According to an account in Haaretz today, that signal is used by Israeli military aircraft and indicates the plane was on Flight Path Blue 21, a route between Sicily and northern Tunisia that is under supervision of Italy's aviation authority, not Tunisia's. Thus the plane could have remained in the area without Tunisian knowledge.

A similar Boeing, painted over to look like a civilian El Al airliner, served as operations center during the Entebbe raid. Those aboard included one of Barak's predecessors, Maj. Gen. Yekutiel Adam, and the then-commander of the Air Force, Maj. Gen. Benny Peled.

The actual attack on Wazir's house took only minutes. The three guards were killed by silenced weapons and Wazir was mowed down when he emerged from his study with a pistol.

In the 1973 Beirut operation, a number of innocent bystanders were killed, including the wife of one of the targeted PLO officials, along with two Israeli commandos. This time, sources say, the only Israeli casualty was one wounded commando.

A senior military officer, who refused to confirm or deny the above account, nonetheless said the operation would boost Army morale. "Here's one of the top terrorist leaders and planners and he gets hit in his home thousands of miles from Israel," said the official. "That has to restore some of the deterrent factor that may have been lost after the hang-glider attack."

It has also restored the confidence of many Israelis. Israeli television last Saturday night carried part of an interview from Tunis with Wazir's teen-aged daughter, in which she described to foreign reporters the terrifying scene when she and her mother stepped out of their bedrooms to find her father lying in a pool of blood and armed strangers standing around his body.

Her mother turned her back and put her head against the wall, awaiting an executioner's bullet, the daughter recalled. But instead, she said, one of the men, speaking Arabic with a heavy Hebrew accent, told the girl, "Go tend to your mother." And with that the men left -- and the assassination of Abu Jihad entered into Israeli legend.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Protesters Force Shops to Close; Soldiers Insist They Stay Open

It was a cat-and-mouse day for Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers in downtown Gaza City today, and the merchants of Omar el Mukhtar Street were the cheese.

When they arrived early this morning, the merchants were greeted by masked young men carrying stones who told them to keep their shops closed as part of a general strike. A few hours later, Israeli soldiers in purple berets and armed with automatic rifles ordered them to reopen. When the soldiers left, the Palestinian youths quickly returned and ordered them to close again.

"You tell me, what can I do?" said the glum-looking manager of the Dador Trading Center. He pointed to the scarred hinges on his sheet metal doors that soldiers had pried open with a crowbar, then to the fresh glass in a window that youths had smashed with a rock a few days before.

"I am twisted from all sides. Every day it's open and close, open and close. If everything is closed here, why does the Army tell me to open?"

In Jerusalem today, the government reacted with what officials called a "low key" statement of "regret and disappointment" to yesterday's U.S. vote in favor of a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel's plan to expel nine Palestinian activists. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said, however, that the vote was "a serious kind of deviation from the framework of our relations with the United States."

But here in the occupied Gaza Strip, where there were more incidents of stone throwing and tire burning for the fourth day following the announcement of the expulsions, the diplomatic maneuvers seemed distant.

Gaza these days is a land of angry youths and determined soldiers locked in a confrontation of Palestinian stones and gasoline bombs against Israeli tear gas, rubber bullets and, at times, live ammunition. At least 24 Palestinians have died here and in the West Bank and more than 180 have been wounded since the violence began Dec. 9.

But it is also a land of merchants and workers, of people trying to eke out a living in circumstances that even in the best of times are tough and unforgiving.

And these are not the best of times. Ever since trouble first exploded here four weeks ago, the shops have been closed almost continuously and for much of that time, the 50,000 Gazans who travel to jobs in Israel daily have been cut off from what for most of them is their only source of income.

Some Israeli officials contend that these Gazans and their counterparts on the West Bank form something of a silent majority that would simply like tranquility to return.

"The Arab population . . . wants to return to normalcy because it also sees that . . . disturbances, acts of incitement and rock throwing do not lead anywhere," Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told Israel radio earlier this week.

In fact, many older Palestinians said, their dilemma is more complex than Shamir's characterization. Many said they feel sympathy for the young men battling the Army. Most have had a run-in at one time or another with Israeli soldiers, incidents that can range from a minor humiliation at a military checkpoint to a jail sentence.

Everyone expressed grievances about conditions after 20 years of military occupation and many insisted they have no second thoughts about the work days and the money they have sacrificed.

But some, when interviewed in private away from other Palestinians, expressed reservations. For many, the first few days of last month's strike were voluntary, something they agreed with and got caught up with. But as the strike ground on, some grew tired but said they were compelled to stay away from work by youths with rocks and threats.

There have been days when "going to work has been like going to war," said Bahai Sofiri, a maintenance worker at the Erez Dayan clothing factory in an Israeli-owned industrial zone just inside the Gaza line. Sofiri said he has reported for work as often as he could during this past month.

"From an ideological point, I agree with the youths, but from a practical point there is no alternative" to working, he said. "I have a wife, I have three children. To continue living, I have to work."

For Arab merchants and workers, the war begins early each day. This morning in Palestine Square, the main commercial center of Gaza City, youths stoned workers lining up for the buses and taxis that take them to Israel. Many went home. At Erez Dayan, only 10 of the 60 workers made it.

Things had grown fairly quiet near the end of last week, merchants said, but then on Sunday Israel announced that it had issued expulsion orders to nine activists, four of whom live in the Gaza Strip, and a soldier killed an Arab woman in a Jerusalem suburb. By Sunday night, Gaza City was erupting again.

On Monday the youths turned their attention to the shopkeepers on Omar el Mukhtar, Gaza's main commercial strip.

The merchants close when they are told to, but they remain on the premises behind metal shutters or outside their shops waiting for the soldiers. They do so, they said, because if they do not open up when ordered, the soldiers either crack open their padlocks with crowbars or weld the doors shut.

Today a 10-man patrol of the crack Oivati brigade made its way down Omar el Mukhtar at about 1 p.m. after a police van with a loudspeaker cruised the street ordering everyone to open. Slowly doors were opened a crack at the Maju Hirat Huna and Lateef Ayyad jewelry stores, at the Ibn Sina pharmacy, the Faris Boutique, the Abu Rahma appliance shop and the El Falugy sewing shop. Some merchants objected, saying they feared protesters would break their windows, but the soldiers ignored them.

The Army said it forces the shops open for the welfare of the merchants and the public.

"We know the main reason these shopkeepers are closing is because they are threatened by other people," said a senior Army commander who asked not to be named in an interview before the violence intensified. "And in most cases we learned that what they prefer is for us to push them. It gives them an excuse to open, which is what most of them want to do."

The merchants dismiss such explanations. "We do not want to open but they force us to," said one of the jewelry shop owners. Like most of the other merchants, he refused to give his name for fear of reprisals. "When they leave, I will close again. This is the crazy life we are living."

After the 10-man patrol left Omar el Mukhtar Street this afternoon, it headed down a side street toward a corner where someone had managed to hang a small flag of the outlawed Palestine Liberation Organization from an electricity wire. The soldiers stood for several minutes pondering the limp banner, then ordered two boys to bring a wooden ladder from a nearby mosque.

The ladder was too short to reach the flag, but then the patrol stopped a blue van and ordered one youth to climb atop it. Standing on a small stool on the roof of the van, he swung at the flag with a broom handle. The soldiers laughed as the boy, age 16, swung and missed three times and almost lost his balance. On the fourth swing he succeeded and the flag fell to the road, where the patrol leader picked it up.

But while the patrol was lingering on the side street, the stone throwers returned to Omar el Mukhtar. They pulled shelves and merchandise from one shop into the street, blocked the road and pelted passing cars with rocks. Like turtles receding into their shells, the shopkeepers quickly shuttered their stores again and the streets emptied.

For the workers at the Erez Dayan factory, working in Gaza contains its own special set of contradictions. The company's prime product is military gear produced by Palestinians who said they hold the Army in fear and contempt.

"It's work, it's nothing," said a worker who gave his name as Samer as he sewed Army jackets. "Look, all Palestinians working are helping Israel whether we do it for the Army or for civilians."

Samer said he broke the general strike and came to work today because he had participated in recent demonstrations and wanted to be able to claim the alibi that he was working when the police come.

A worker who said his name is Mohammed said he had returned because, "I had enough. People can't last a month or more without work."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Young Arabs Hurl Rocks for Thrill and 'To Get Back Our Land'

Theirs is a gray world of stone -- stone fences, stone houses, stone gardens. The soil is hard and unforgiving, the sun bright and punishing. Vegetation is scarce. Stone is the most available resource, the easiest thing for children to see and touch. In a place where playthings are scarce, it is their toy.

Meet Mohammed, a 10-year-old with a runny nose and a smudged face, dressed in frayed blue jeans and a tattered blue sweater. In one of his pockets is a home-made slingshot -- a small patch of leather inside a large rubber band -- that he uses to shoot pebbles and marbles at cars and buses.

On his left shin is a perfectly round, bluish-red bruise he got Tuesday from an Israeli rubber bullet when soldiers fired at stone throwers in this refugee camp on the occupied West Bank. "It hurt a little bit but I didn't cry," he says proudly.

Then there is Farid, age 12. Every morning when he starts out for school he packs a few stones in his book bag. He likes to throw the stones at Israeli soldiers and at the Jewish vehicles passing near his home. It's fun, he says, and besides, "We hope that by throwing stones we will get back our rights and our land."

And there is Thaer, age 7, wearing plaid bedroom slippers with no socks, a brown sweater, a green scarf and a wide grin yesterday morning. His parents tell him not to throw stones but "I don't listen," he says. "I want to be like the rest of the kids." He says his heroes are Yasser Arafat -- and Lenin.

These are the children of the stones, the youngest warriors in a wave of civil unrest that started more than eight weeks ago in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. They live in the Dehaishe refugee camp, a bleak, overcrowded ghetto of perhaps 10,000 Palestinians whose concrete houses cling to the side of a rocky slope just south of Bethlehem in the West Bank.

Dehaishe is located to the east of the Jerusalem-Hebron road, a main highway that has become the newest battleground in the violence. Jewish settlers use this road to travel to their homes in places like Efrat and Kiryat Arba. The highway has become a shooting gallery, and their cars and buses are targets for stones, bottles and molotov cocktails. So are the soldiers assigned to protect them.

It is, increasingly, a children's war. Motorists and soldiers say they usually do not get a good look at the stone throwers who dart out from behind the shops that line the highway, fling their rocks and then dash back in retreat. But those that do often express surprise at the youth of their assailants.

Most Israelis who have seen these children from refugee camps believe the children throw stones for excitement, or because they are ordered to do so by their older brothers and sisters. "They are so young, I don't think they hate us," said an Army officer in Tulkarm, a refugee camp in the north. "It's just a game to them."

But like Farid, most of the dozen or so young stone throwers interviewed yesterday say they throw rocks not just for fun but because they believe they are harming their enemies. And even the youngest among them, such as six-year-old Said, know who the enemy is. "It is the Jews," he says with a shy smile.

Dehaishe, like every refugee camp in this region, has its own bitter history. Most of the residents came here in 1948, fleeing from 39 villages around the central Israeli towns of Lod and Ramle and from Jerusalem. Some were expelled by Israeli forces during the 1948 independence war, while others left on their own because of fear or because their leaders ordered them out.

Dehaishe was supposed to be a temporary stopover on the way back to their homes and fields. Instead it has become a permanent address and, for many residents, a cage. The caged feeling is exacerbated by the 20-foot-high chain-link fence the Army has erected between the camp and the highway to block the stones, and by the barricades of concrete-filled oil drums and barbed wire that seal off all but one entrance to the road.

The children here are very young, but already they are well-versed in the abiding grievances of their people. Many have fathers, uncles or brothers who have been arrested and jailed by the Israelis.

As they grow up, they see scenes that fit the stories they hear, such as the razor wire blocking off the local youth center. The center was boarded up five years ago by the authorities, who claimed it was a planning ground for violent demonstrations. Some have been awakened after midnight by shouts and screams when soldiers entered the camp to make arrests. They have also seen settlers, infuriated by stone throwers, invade the camp grounds brandishing weapons and shooting out windows of houses, or seizing young suspects and hauling them to the nearby military headquarters.

"They have very strong feelings about what's going on," said an Arab child psychologist in the southern city of Hebron who asked not to be identified. "They see their brothers throw stones and they want to do it too.

"I have a niece who is 2 1/2. When she sees soldiers, she runs away shouting, 'They want to shoot me.' She's developing the same characteristics and fears of her parents and her brothers."

And so, indoctrinated in their cause by both their families and their enemies, the children of Dehaishe have joined the war. "They have broken a lot of our glass, so we have to get our glass back," says Farid about the Israelis. "But we also want to injure them because they have injured us and killed our people."

The children say the best time for stone throwing is just before school, at around 8 a.m., when Jewish commuters head toward Jerusalem, or around dusk when the light fades and it is hard to catch a child in Dehaishe's maze of winding dirt roads. The best targets are the red-and-white Egged (pronounced Egg-ed) public buses, because they are big and have many windows. The best place is near the shops, where there is a long gap in the preventive fence.

Since he is 12, Farid is in the pivotal age group between the very young and the teen-agers. "Sometimes I lead the younger kids and sometimes I follow the older kids," he says.

Sometimes the young work for their older brothers, Mohammed says, piling up stones at strategic locations and bringing buckets of water to help ward off the effects of tear gas. The youngest also serve as scouts, standing watch on the low ground and scampering up the hill to warn their brothers when the soldiers arrive.

Like good quarterbacks, the children quickly learn to throw ahead of a speeding car so the stone arrives at the same time as the vehicle. They can distinguish between the dull sound of rubber bullets and the sharper report of live ammunition. They know there is only one unit of soldiers guarding the road after dark and they know where those soldiers are posted.

They collect spent cartridges and tear gas canisters as souvenirs, and have songs that celebrate the stones as their weapons.

Faced with this kind of enthusiasm, the soldiers have few tools to fight back. They can round up the youngsters and hold them temporarily, but the Army says it imprisons no one under 14. While slapping a curfew on a camp inhibits the adults, it appears to have little impact on the children.

Sometimes the soldiers get angry and some of the older children say they have been caught and slapped around.

Wael, 12, says he was on his way to his grandfather's house Thursday when soldiers grabbed him and beat him on the back and then broke his arm, now tightly wrapped in splints. His father, Zahail, a van driver, is deeply angry.

"After what happened to my kid, I'm ready to lead a demonstration myself," Zahail says. "They broke his arm for nothing. It's crazy for the Army to respond to little kids. The reaction is much worse than the action. The Army should just leave."

Mohammed says his parents do not approve of his stone-throwing and beat him once when they found out he had been involved. Other parents seem ambivalent and some seem wrapped so tightly in their own web of anger that they offer vocal or tacit approval even though they know their children risk physical injury.

Halima, a mother of six, listened to her 10-year-old son, Ghassam, describe his involvement in the stone-throwing. Asked if she approves, she replies, "We are afraid for our kids but all our people have to resist the occupation. Even if he's injured, we are used to it now. Of course we are affected but other people's kids are killed. So we don't stop them."

And what about the occupants of the cars they hit, some of whom are children also? "Any mother is pained when a child is hurt because a child is not responsible," replies Halima. "It's the adults who should be blamed. We hurt the Jews and they hurt us. They are provoking us. They don't stop their soldiers, so we don't stop our kids."

Shmuel Ben Yishai is a Jewish settler from Kiryat Arba who started packing a gun and riding the highway with other vigilantes after the cars of his neighbors were smashed by stones. He has been inside Dehaishe many times in the past year and he hates the Arabs as much as they hate him. The young stone throwers do not suprise him.

"Maybe I'll teach my kids to throw stones at Arab cars," he says. "Look, this is a war. My kids are their enemy and their kids are my enemy. It's as simple as that."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The stones hit the roof of the beige Chevy Blazer like sharp cracks of thunder. From the front passenger seat, out jumped Maj. Gen. Amram Mitzna, the wiry, bearded man who commands Israel's forces in the occupied West Bank. As more stones fell around his uncovered head, he scanned the buildings above while two of his soldiers clicked magazines into their automatic rifles and sprinted up the hill.

Ten minutes later, with darkness drawing a curtain over the road, the soldiers returned empty-handed. "In the beginning they were brave enough to stand and yell and fight with us," said Mitzna of the young Palestinian stone throwers. "Now they're gone with the wind."

Indeed, a lot of things have changed for Mitzna and his men since the Palestinian uprising began here and in the Gaza Strip last December. Tactics are different on both sides: The mass demonstrations and human waves of Arab rioters of December and January have been replaced by small roving bands who throw their rocks or gasoline bombs, then try to melt away. Similarly, the uncertain, sometimes confused response of the Army has given way to tougher, swifter and more aggressive use of clubs, plastic bullets and other weapons.

But some of the biggest changes have taken place inside the soldiers themselves and in their soft-spoken commander. Eight months ago, Mitzna startled a press conference by confessing, "I don't feel so well when I wake up in the morning" because of the discomfort and unease he and his men felt about doing riot duty against Palestinian civilians.

These days the general says he has the same nagging feelings but has learned to control them. Like the men he commands, Mitzna, who is one of Israel's most decorated soldiers, has stopped wishing he were somewhere else and has buckled down to a mission that he still clearly finds distasteful but also unavoidable -- smothering the nine-month-old uprising.

"I think that today we are less naive, less hysterical in the face of a particular problem, and we can see better the total picture," he said in an interview last week. "It takes time to realize this is not a local thing or a one-day thing, but something you have to live with every day, not only physically but mentally. Our understanding now, from generals down to privates, is much better."

The interview was part of a 14-hour day that began at dawn and ended well after dark, during which this correspondent accompanied Mitzna around the West Bank and other parts of his command. It was a day in which the dilemmas and problems he and his men face were on full display.

For several weeks now, the Israeli Defense Force has been on the offensive in the West Bank, adopting more aggressive tactics against street demonstrators, staging large-scale roundups in alleged trouble spots, cracking down with economic sanctions against recalcitrant villages and freely using new, usually nonlethal plastic bullets against alleged rioters.

About 18,000 Palestinians have been arrested since the uprising began, and more than 5,000 remain imprisoned. More than 30 houses of alleged gasoline-bomb and stone throwers have been demolished and 60 persons have been slated for expulsion, all under emergency military regulations stipulating that these measures can be taken without the subject first being charged or convicted in court. About 250 Palestinians have been killed, most of them shot by soldiers, and five Israelis also have died.

At the same time, the uprising has become an institutional fact of life for the Army. A brigadier general has replaced a colonel as line officer in charge of West Bank operations under Mitzna's command. Annual reserve duty has been lengthened to 60 from 30 days, and most soldiers here are reservists, freeing regular troops for training. Many reservists are on their second tour of duty here.

Mitzna, who has a computer printout of unrest statistics on his desk by 6 each morning, says the number of violent incidents these days is only about half what it was during the height of the unrest in January and February. But the number of soldiers stationed in the West Bank, while down by 25 to 33 percent from June, is still more than double what it was last year.

"The mission is not to solve the problem in the West Bank, the mission is to lower the level of violence," he said. "The problem is still there, but I think we have succeeded in controlling it. In such a situation, a declining trend in violence is some kind of success."

Along the way, Mitzna has shed a few illusions. Whereas the general once spoke about hoping to return the situation in the West Bank to the relative tranquility of last year, he now says the goal is to keep violence down and keep the main West Bank roads open. While he once argued that most Palestinians desired such tranquility and were opposed to the violence, he now concedes that many, if not most, have been swept up by the spirit of civil revolt and would participate if the Army did not hold them in check.

And while he once spoke openly about the painful dilemmas of his mission, these days he is more circumspect. "Everything here is a political mine field," he said after several incidents in which his comments became front-page headlines and led to calls from the Israeli right for his dismissal.

The new Mitzna is less introspective, less willing to admit to doubts. He defends tough measures such as beating alleged rioters, administrative detentions, house demolitions and deportations as necessary and effective in restoring law and order. Villages that defy the Army will not be allowed to sell their harvests. Schools will remain closed as long as they remain centers of unrest.

Still, now and then sympathy for Palestinians and glimmers of doubt about the ultimate goals of his mission seem to show through. Mitzna bemoaned the inability of Palestine Liberation Organization leaders to take steps toward political moderation and expressed the hope that West Bankers might someday develop authentic local leaders independent of the PLO and capable of negotiating peace with Israel.

"People here want something to come from all they have suffered, to achieve something for this terrible year," he said. "But the leaders of the PLO do not seem able to deliver it."

But when asked how moderate local leaders will establish themselves if he locks them up as soon as they arise, he replied: "That's a good question. And I really don't have the answer."

Like many senior officers, Amram Mitzna, 43, is a member of Israel's leftist kibbutz movement and a veteran of three wars who has been wounded twice in combat. He first came to public attention in 1982 when, as a training college staff commander, he called publicly for the resignation of Ariel Sharon as defense minister after the ill-fated Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

When Mitzna took over as head of the Israeli Defense Force's Central Command in May 1987, his philosophy toward the West Bank's 850,000 Arabs was "live and let live." He had no intention of offending their dignity or interfering in their daily lives, he said, provided law and order was maintained. Mitzna's main critics seemed to be not the Palestinians but Jewish settlers after he ordered 13 of them arrested and sharply criticized their conduct following a vigilante incident in the Dehaishe refugee camp.

But the uprising that began Dec. 9 in the occupied Gaza Strip (which is under another commander's jurisdiction) shattered the modus vivendi. After years of what most Israelis saw as a relatively painless military occupation, the price rose sharply as troops poorly trained and equipped for riot duty were poured into the West Bank and the death toll began to rise.

At first, Mitzna and other generals complained publicly that their men were not prepared to be riot police and that the law-and-order mission was cutting into regular training time and jeopardizing Israel's top military priority -- defense of its borders. But gradually the Army has adjusted.

This morning, Mitzna's day began with a training exercise in the Negev Desert for regular troops. Some had spent the previous weekend on alert in the West Bank town of Ramallah, but they arrived in time to join in the practice combat along with hundreds of troops, several tanks and support artillery. The highlight of the morning was a direct hit on a target hundreds of yards away by a two-man, hand-held missile launching team.

"This is how we prefer to fight," said Maj. Ofra Preuss, Mitzna's spokesman. "In this war you shoot the target and if you hit it everyone applauds. In the West Bank, if you hit the target, you get a military police investigation."

By 10 a.m. the general was back at his West Bank headquarters near Jerusalem for staff meetings. By early afternoon, he was in Ramallah to meet with 18 local officers, most of them reservists, who are on the front lines of the uprising in this area, one of the focal points of the unrest.

The officers have many complaints. They have managed to keep the main roads clear of large demonstrations, but small groups of stone throwers still conduct random assaults on Israeli cars. Remote Arab villages are even more of a problem because the officers lack the manpower to patrol them constantly.

"Every time you go into one, you get stoned," said an officer. "Every time we go in and clean it, they come back the next day."

Tear gas and rubber bullets are not effective in dealing with the small bands that now predominate, the officers said. They would like more plastic bullets, which have greater range and more accuracy than rubber ones, but their use is restricted to trained officers because the bullets can be lethal if they hit someone's head or chest.

One officer said he feels humiliated because under Army regulations he cannot automatically open fire on stone throwers. "They laugh at us," he said. "They know we won't use live ammunition."

Mitzna wanted to know why a Palestinian girl was shot in the head with a plastic bullet the previous day. The officer who was at the scene replied, "I don't know. It was a human mistake."

The response is not adequate. "Don't argue," Mitzna told the officer. "The result was bad. The fact it happened was against all the orders. I don't care what happened -- it was wrong." The girl, Nahil Tokheh, 13, died in a Jerusalem hospital Saturday.

Mitzna discussed the previous day's events, when about 30 Palestinians were wounded in Gaza and the West Bank during demonstrations marking the sixth anniversary of the massacres at Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

"We felt good because we quickly dispersed the demonstrators, but it doesn't matter," he told his men. "The headlines say 30 casualties. The result for the PLO was good. To them it means the intifada [uprising] continues."

One of the men listening was a reserve lieutenant colonel named Nimrod. His father was a brigade commander during the 1967 war and was the first senior officer to enter Ramallah. Now Nimrod has spent two long tours of duty here. He said he fears that 20 years from now, his 2-year-old son will also be there.

Earlier, while waiting for Mitzna to convene the meeting, Nimrod said he felt trapped in an unreal world of stone throwing and shooting. Yesterday, he said, he shot in the leg a young Palestinian man who he said was leading a mob. "I felt nothing, nothing at all; it was all a game," he said, amazed at his own indifference.

Like Mitzna, Nimrod comes from a left-wing background and says he would return all of the West Bank for peace. He only wants out. Yet during the discussions later, he pressed for even tougher measures against recalcitrant villages, such as cutting off their electricity and conducting night raids.

Mitzna concurred. "It's important for these villages to know they can't clash with the Army without consequences," he said.

Later, as darkness gathered, Mitzna and Nimrod toured some of the remote villages that have given his men the most trouble. On the way, the general discussed the importance of keeping the initiative now that the Army appears to be gaining more control.

"For now, things are quieter," he said. "But a blow of wind from an unknown direction or at an unknown time -- things you cannot control or foresee -- could bring it back again."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Critics Say System Is Harsh and Arbitrary

It was just after midnight when a dozen Israeli soldiers and two plainclothesmen came for Walid Abdul Salaam.

"You are going on a long journey," Abdul Salaam said one of the agents told him, as they pulled him from the room where his wife and two children were sleeping. "Please hurry, you are the first."

He said he dressed quickly while they waited. Then they bound his hands behind his back, blindfolded him and guided him to a bus that served as a makeshift paddywagon. Throughout the night it rumbled through the occupied West Bank, plucking Palestinian activists from their beds.

Abdul Salaam, 32, spent the next 18 days as a prisoner in Israel's crowded, chaotic and, by Arab accounts, often brutal military prison system.

He was never charged with a crime, never tried, never even interrogated by the authorities -- but he considered himself lucky. While he was granted an early release, hundreds of other Palestinians have remained imprisoned under regulations that allow the authorities to hold them for at least six months without charge or trial.

As the Israelis have sought to throttle the five-month-old Palestinian uprising, they have turned to a form of arrest that they call "administrative detention" as one of their prime weapons. Until December, Israel generally held about 50 Arabs under these regulations. Now Israeli officials say the number is at least 1,700, more than one-third of the total 5,000 Palestinians currently imprisoned for alleged involvement in the revolt.

To hold these new inmates, Israel has opened or converted five additional prison camps, including a massive facility in the Negev desert where prisoners say water supplies are short and conditions rugged. To make it easier to hold them, the Army has abolished the requirement that each case be subject to judicial review and has given senior military officers the power to order detentions. New restrictions have also been put on family visits.

The result, according to critics, including defense lawyers, human rights activists and diplomats, is an arbitrary and harsh system of secret justice that has few discernible rules or standards and that offers its victims no workable appeal.

"In the past the Israelis always had some standards," said a western diplomat who monitors the process. "They needed enough evidence to at least satisfy their own consciences. Now the standards have been swept away."

In Washington, the State Department said on Thursday it opposed administrative detention. "Those detained should be accorded judicial due process," said spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley.

Israeli officials contend that administrative detention has helped stem the uprising, in which at least 176 Palestinians and two Israeli Jews have been killed.

"I do not believe that one measure constitutes a magic formula," Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said on Israeli television last week. "No one measure alone will extinguish the violence . . . [but] administrative detentions have made it easier for us to arrest the inciting organizers in a wide sweep."

The net is a wide one. It encompasses activists, alleged instigators and a significant segment of the Palestinian elite. Sometimes, the Army in its roundups seems to be working off lists of names of those previously arrested or convicted of security crimes. At other times, the detentions and the reasons for them appear more arbitrary.

"They don't inform the family, they don't even inform the person himself," says Mona Rishmawi, a Palestinian lawyer.

Among those being held are doctors, lawyers, union leaders, university officials and students, including many student council chairmen. At least 20 journalists are in detention, including five of the nine officers of the Arab Journalists Association, according to a tally by western diplomats. Four of the five full-time field workers of Law in the Service of Man, the Ramallah-based legal rights organization that Rishmawi works for, are also on the list of prisoners.

These people comprise much of the local Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories, precisely the kind of people that Israeli officials, including Rabin, say they want to negotiate with over the future of the West Bank and Gaza. Ironically, they are being held under the same kind of regulations that the British used during the days of their rule of Palestine to detain such future Israeli leaders as Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and Rabin.

One of the most prominent prisoners is Nabil Jabari, 42, who is chairman of the board of trustees of Hebron University, a British-trained dental surgeon in East Jerusalem and the head of a charitable society. He was called in to the Shin Bet internal security service's office in Hebron on March 10 and has been held ever since.

A senior military official said Jabari is in detention because he allegedly maintained "very close connections with senior Palestine Liberation Organization activists in the territories and abroad" and received "instructions" on how to advance the organization's aims. The PLO is outlawed in Israel and the occupied territories, which Israel captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Jabari also is accused of distributing PLO money to elements involved in the uprising and helping organize public disturbances at the university, according to the official.

None of these charges has been made in court, and Jabari has not been officially notified of them. They are part of a secret file he and his lawyers are not allowed to examine. The reason, the senior Israeli official said, is that the file contains clues to the identity of confidential informers and agents that might place their lives in danger.

"If we know for sure that disclosing information in public will endanger someone's life, we have no alternative except to use administrative detention," said the official.

But friends and western diplomats described Jabari very differently from the portrait in the file. "It's like Alice in Wonderland," said a diplomat who knows Jabari well. "He is very realistic, very moderate, not a real leader or collaborator, and he kept the university open. The charges about him organizing disturbances are totally false."

Until last month, prisoners had to be brought before a military judge within 96 hours of their arrest, and an appeals board would automatically review the case within three months. Both those safeguards have been dropped, and only those who request an appeal get a review. Jabari's lawyer has filed an appeal, but there is such a backlog that it may take weeks or months to be heard.

In the meantime, Jabari and his family say they pay a human price. His American-born wife, Carol, and his three children are allowed a 30-minute visit every two weeks. Last Monday, Carol Jabari said, she and her children waited three hours outside Jeneid prison in Nablus for their turn to stand in a small room with 10 other families and speak to her husband standing on the other side of a wire-mesh barrier.

"My daughter Suzanne [age 8] broke down, she was devastated," said Carol Jabari. "My son Talal [age 10] is just filled with hate now. Well, that's understandable, isn't it?"

"You can't just sit there and cry," she added. "You have to get on with it. You have to cope with your children, you have to cope with your life."

Last weekend, however, the family's plight grew worse. Nabil Jabari was transferred along with dozens of other prisoners from nearby Jeneid to remote Ketziot, the new Negev desert detention center southwest of Beersheba, near the Egyptian border. It houses about 2,300 prisoners, nearly half of them under administrative detention, and the number is expected to grow to at least 4,000.

Conditions there are grim, according to Abdul Salaam, who spent 11 days of his detention there, and according to Israeli journalists who were taken on an Army tour of the facility two weeks ago. Inmates live in canvas tents, water supplies are limited, toilet facilities are primitive. The climate is scorching hot in daytime and cold at night.

But even worse than the physical conditions, said Abdul Salaam, is the sense of isolation inmates feel at the facility, which they have nicknamed "Ansar III," after the prison camp the Israelis maintained until 1985 in southern Lebanon. No one has a name there but rather a number -- Abdul Salaam's was 1,101 -- which they must call out four times daily during roll calls while they sit in long rows cross-legged with their hands behind their backs and their heads down.

Abdul Salaam said his 18th day was the hardest because he knew that, under Israeli law, if he were held any longer he would automatically become a six-month prisoner. But at nightfall, he recalled, an official came to his tent and told him he could leave.

He and four other released prisoners were driven to the crossroads outside the desert town of Arad, where they were put out and told to make their own way, he said. They walked for miles in the starry desert night before an Arab driver stopped and gave them a ride to Hebron.

Abdul Salaam makes his living composing songs that he sings while playing the oud, a traditional Arab stringed instrument similar to a lute. In recent months he has composed many songs about the Palestinian uprising -- but none yet about his time in Ansar III. It was, he said, too wrenching to sing about.

"In that place you feel you are at the end of the world," he recalled, "and if they do anything to you, nobody knows and nobody heard of you. In that situation I was really afraid."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The yellow Israeli bulldozer rumbled methodically through the backyard of Ahmed Abdul Aziz on a crisp spring morning last week. It buried his vegetable garden, then assaulted his grove of 25 almond, olive and mulberry trees, ripping each one out of the earth and shoving it aside while Aziz and his family looked on in gaping silence.

Four days earlier, someone had hidden in the grove, which lies next to the main highway 10 miles north of Jerusalem, and thrown a gasoline bomb at a passing school bus filled with Jewish children. The children escaped unharmed, but the bus caught fire and burned spectacularly.

And now the Army was retaliating. The target was not the bomb thrower, however, but the land and those who live on it.

The Palestinian uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip reached the age of 100 days this past week and at the same time it turned a corner. What began as a confrontation between stone-throwing teen-agers and young soldiers has now taken on an air of permanence, blossoming into a full-scale intercommunal struggle between Arab and Jew -- "a war of populations," in the words of Israeli journalist Joel Greenberg.

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you," wrote Leon Trotsky. He was referring to the vortex that war inevitably creates, sucking in whole communities and individuals who have thought of themselves as neutrals or noncombatants.

So it was with the uprising this past week. Arab policemen who had stood on the sidelines, still working for the Israeli administration but shunning political and security cases, were forced to resign after receiving a threatening directive from Palestinian activists.

Farmers and merchants who sell their produce and wares in the markets that dot the West Bank were cut off and sent home by an Army determined to raise the economic stakes of the challenge to Israeli rule. Families like the Azizes found themselves bewildered victims in a struggle they barely understood.

The two sides seem locked in a test of will that is both logical and chaotic at the same time. The Palestinians appear to be aiming at decimating the system that has administered the occupation for 21 years, while the Israelis are seeking to puncture the sense of euphoria and triumph that so far has marked the uprising for the Palestinians.

Each side appears determined to inflict the maximum pain on the other. Palestinians burn a school bus and so Israelis bulldoze trees. Arabs stone cars of Jewish settlers and so settlers vandalize Arab cars. Someone throws a molotov cocktail at a fuel tanker and so the Army cuts off gasoline supplies. Arab police resign and so the Army restricts travel, closes markets and cuts off international phone lines.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin has compared this contest to the "war of attrition" that Israel fought with Egypt in artillery duels and air raids across the Suez Canal in the late 1960s. Each side is seeking to wear down the other, he told the Israeli Cabinet recently, adding, "I can assure you, the Army will not be the first to tire."

But the Palestinians do not sound tired either. "We have never felt so close, never felt this sense of identity or pride or this feeling of oneness," said Saeb Erakat, a West Bank political scientist. "What the Israelis are doing now will not bring us to surrender. Four months ago we were ignored by everyone, and now we have moved the world.

"We didn't plan or anticipate this uprising. But now people really feel that if we stop and look back, we'll be lost like Lot's wife. The only alternative is to go forward."

Erakat's family home is in Jericho, a sleepy West Bank town that illustrates just how wide the uprising has spread. Jericho is a farming and tourist center and traditionally a tranquil oasis where Arabs and Israelis both come for long lunches and languid afternoons under palm trees.

While the rest of the West Bank was burning, Jericho stayed calm. But three weeks ago someone threw a molotov cocktail at soldiers, someone stoned a tourist bus here and a few days later someone else killed an Arab policeman in a refugee camp on the outskirts of town. The Army then swung into action, sealing off the area for several days and detaining several dozen alleged activists.

This past week, the Army's net spread much farther. The military governor decreed that shops and the central farmers' market would only be allowed to open in the afternoon -- the time when the Palestine Liberation Organization decreed they should be closed during the partial commercial strike it has conducted throughout the territories. Soldiers patrolled the marketplace and stopped wholesalers' trucks coming to buy produce.

"They just want to tell us that they control the streets," said Munther Arekat, whose family grows vegetables and watermelons on a 200-acre spread east of town. "They want to break our spirit by making us lose money."

If so, that aspect of the ban is working. Crates of tomatoes that normally wholesale for up to $20 this time of year are now going for $3.50, says Arekat, because customers have all but vanished.

But the restrictions are politicizing the generally conservative farmers and turning them into smugglers. They sell directly from the fields, with one eye scanning the horizon for Army patrols, cutting deals with those wholesalers brave enough to run the risk of being stopped and arrested for having a vanload of produce.

The verdict is still out on whether the new crackdown will succeed, but some activists welcome it.

"Collective punishment at this time is good for us," Mubarak Awad, an advocate of nonviolent resistance to the occupation, told The Jerusalem Post. "The cut-off of electricity, phones, fuel and perhaps even water means Israel is doing the job of separation for us. Collective punishment strengthens us morally, spiritually and unites us. It is our water and our spirit."

The defense establishment, made cautious by the international alarm that arose when Rabin announced previous strategies, has kept public silence on the new economic sanctions. But Brig. Gen. Yaacov Orr, the military commander of Gaza, acknowledged the limits of the Army's strategy in an interview.

"The question we always ask ourselves is who is controlling the area," he said. "Most of the people, they don't love the situation, they don't love Israel. In fact, you can say they may hate us. But I think we are now in a new phase where people maybe are a little tired and they feel they can't achieve anything more with demonstrations."

Orr has been a professional soldier for 24 of his 42 years and he is a restrained, methodical commander. He believes he and his men have succeeded in limiting the war on the ground between soldiers and stone-throwers, but expresses less confidence in the effectiveness of collective sanctions.

"We prefer that the economic steps be very pinpointed against those arrested or involved in any violence," he said. Otherwise, "it won't work. It might even hurt more."

The Army has 10 times as many troops in Gaza and the West Bank as it had before the uprising began in early December, according to Orr, who noted with pride that as of Wednesday, only one Gazan had been shot dead by soldiers since Jan. 15. Two others died from beatings in incidents still under Army investigation.

"I can say we have stopped violent demonstrations with aggressiveness and with force, but not with shooting," he says. "But the situation is not back to normal. It's far from it."

Indeed, on Friday, two days after Orr spoke, a new wave of riots hit Gaza. Soldiers opened fire, killing one man and wounding at least a dozen others.

Orr understands the limits of his firepower in Gaza, but sometimes he daydreams about how quickly he could suppress this revolt if he had the same tools that the Syrian government used in killing up to 20,000 rebels and bystanders in the city of Hama six years ago.

"There are very nice techniques," he said with a small smile. "You could bring a tank here and fire, and everything would be fine very quickly. But you can't do it."

Instead, Israel's high-tech Army is turning the clock back. Rather than concentrate on designing computerized weaponry for the electronic battlefield, researchers are developing fiberglass clubs to replace the wooden ones that splintered too quickly on the streets. A cannon that shoots gravel at demonstrators was unveiled two weeks ago.

And there is the bulldozer, another symbol of the Army's new look. Bulldozers lately have been used to seal off main roads in recalcitrant Arab villages and neighborhoods. One was involved in a notorious incident last month in which four Palestinians were briefly buried alive. And one came to the Aziz homestead in Bireh Thursday to take revenge for the bus firebombing.

For two hours it worked its way through the yard until finally it came to the last survivor, a slender tree clinging to the hillside beyond the reach of its steel jaw. Soldiers swung a noose of cable around the slim trunk and for 20 minutes the machine tugged and grunted, bending the tree but not breaking it.

Finally it snapped with a loud crack. Mission accomplished, the soldiers scrambled back up the hill to their jeeps, the bulldozer pulled away. Another small skirmish was over in a bitter, prolonged struggle.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)