Commitment To Peace Talks Keeps Hebron From Exploding

Taking a day off from school, Abdel Karim al-Atrash was working at his father’s vegetable cart Wednesday morning when he heard a burst of automatic gunfire cut into the bustle of Hebron’s downtown market.

Abdel, 16, looked up to see the crowded stalls around him turned into a shooting gallery by an Israeli soldier gone amok.

“I was standing behind the cart when I heard rapid firing,” he recalled Wednesday in Alia Hospital, where he was being treated for a leg injury. “I looked over my shoulder and saw a man in uniform holding a gun and moving it from right to left. We dropped to the ground, the shooting went on and I felt that I was hit in my leg.”

Jamal al-Hamouz was buying vegetables nearby when he found himself in the line of fire as the soldier, Noam Friedman, sprayed the market with bullets. “We fell on the ground and people started screaming,” Hamouz said.

Pandemonium erupted as the attacker was overpowered by other soldiers and hustled to a jeep. Soldiers and police officers pushed back Palestinians who converged on the scene. Men carried out the wounded to cars and ambulances.

For a while, it seemed as if Hebron was slipping back into familiar patterns of violence, and that the whole tinderbox city was about to erupt.

Young men set up barricades of rocks and burning tires and hurled stones at Israeli jeeps near Aliya Hospital. Army vehicles roared through the streets, enforcing a curfew, shutting Palestinians up in their homes. Israeli armored personnel carriers took up positions outside the neighboring settlement of Qiryat Arba and on a hill overlooking the Jewish settler enclaves in Hebron.

At the hospital, Fawzia al-Atrash, the wounded boy’s mother, vented anger at the Israelis, repeating complaints of many Palestinians here that an emerging agreement on an Israeli pullback in Hebron was flawed because it kept in place some 450 militant Jewish settlers in the heart of this city of 160,000 Arabs.

But in another room in the hospital, Palestinian security officials met to contain the violence. Working with the Israelis and following directives from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the officials moved swiftly to prevent unrest that might disrupt the Israeli withdrawal.

At the scene of the shooting, Jibril Rajoub, the powerful chief of the Palestinian security service in the West Bank, met with Israeli army generals and the head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service to prevent the violence from spinning out of control. “We can’t raise a white flag to the criminal,” Rajoub told reporters. “We as Palestinians are committed to the process.”

But Rajoub asserted that the attack showed that after all the tortuous negotiations with the Israelis on improved security for the settlers, it was the Palestinians who were in need of protection.

“Now it’s clear who’s in danger,” he said.

For the settlers, the shooting did not change the balance of violence. It was still clear, they argued, that most attacks in Hebron were against Jews, and that they remain under threat, especially after the expected army withdrawal.