Defense Minister Moshe Arens announced Thursday he would order the deportation of a dozen more Palestinians suspected of terrorist activities.
He made the announcement as Jewish settlers, seething with fury, buried one of their own, Doron Shushan of Kfar Darom in the Gaza Strip, who was gunned down by an Arab on Wednesday.
Shushan, 35, was the fourth and latest victim of Arab gunmen in the administered territories since October. The Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, in its latest leaflet, called for attacking “settlers everywhere.”
Security forces said 40 suspects were arrested for questioning.
The defense minister did not immediately disclose the names of those slated for deportation. He said they were known members of groups involved in the intifada and other anti-Israel activities in recent months.
Arens’ announcement was clearly intended to mollify settlers and other militants, who have accused the defense establishment recently of lax security measures and have repeatedly demanded the deportation of all intifada activists.
But he was said to have ordered the removal of the handful of mobile homes which settlers of Kfar Darom immediately installed at the site of the killing, with the intention of erecting a new settlement, to be called Doron.
West Bank settlers have reacted similarly to three earlier shootings in that vicinity, in each instance creating a nucleus of a settlement named after a murdered settler.
Shushan, a former member of Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha who had moved to the Gaza Strip with his wife after turning religious, was driving home from his tomato hothouse Wednesday when an unidentified man approached his car outside the Deir el-Balah refugee camp and fired five shots at point-blank range.
Bleeding heavily from the head and neck, the mortally wounded settler drove on for a few minutes before his car halted on the pavement. He was found by a passing military vehicle, which rushed him to a hospital, where he later died.
The killing occurred on the 27th anniversary of the founding of Al Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
