An Israeli soldier in Nablus received a stab wound Tuesday evening.
His assailant was injured and captured, and soldiers and security forces held off a crowd with rubber bullets while both injured people were taken to a hospital. No further details were available at press time.
The discouragement of such individual acts and group demonstrations of violence was on the mind of Chief of Staff Gen. Dan Shomron.
He told military correspondents here Monday that the Israel Defense Force has doubled its strength in the West Bank and tripled it in the Gaza Strip.
He said the crucial date was Friday, Jan. 1, the anniversary of the founding of Al Fatah, the main terrorist group within the Palestine Liberation Organization. The anniversary has triggered disturbances in the past.
Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin repeatedly warned Tuesday that the IDF would not permit violence and unrest to reach the intensity of the past several weeks.
EVENTS WON’T BE REPEATED
The newspaper Haaretz reported his pledge that “the disturbances in the territories will not occur again. Even if we are forced to use massive force, under no circumstances will we allow last week’s events to repeat themselves.”
Shomron indicated that the beefed-up IDF presence in the territories and the recent arrests of agitators and potential agitators would quell trouble.
The chief of staff disclosed that riot- and crowd-control programs have been introduced into the training of soldiers and new recruits. He rejected the idea of special riot control units on grounds that they would divert the army from its main task, to prepare for all-out war.
Shomron hinted, however, that riot-control may be assigned to the largely Bedouin border police, which has received special training for that purpose. He said the border police force was being enlarged.
Shomron insisted that the IDF exercised remarkable restraint in face of provocation and danger during nearly three weeks of violent disturbances in the territories.
The few cases where soldiers opened fire without justification are under investigation by the military police, he said.
Twenty-two Palestinians were reported killed in the rioting.
TAKEN BY SURPRISE
He acknowledged that the scope and intensity of the recent disturbances took the security forces by surprise. He said they lacked the equipment normally used by the civilian police to control rioting.
Largely because of budget constraints, the IDF ran short of rubber bullets, tear gas and other non-lethal means to restore order, Shomron said. Equipment is being procured from abroad and from Israeli manufacturers, including water cannons, he said.
He stressed during a television interview Monday night that the IDF is an army, and assumes the role of a police force only in extreme cases, such as the recent unrest.
He expressed satisfaction with the speedy arrests of those he termed “agitators.” The arrests began on the first day of the riots.
“Naturally, as things continue, more agitators are identified, more demonstrators are identified, and naturally, more are arrested,” he said.
“From the first day, we arrested every day, every agitator whose name was written down on our lists. We arrested them from the beginning,” Shomron said.
Israeli authorities estimate that about 1,000 Palestinians were arrested during the unrest.
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