Two Palestinians were killed over the weekend, one apparently by militant Jewish settlers, as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip staged a general strike to protest the arrival of U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz.
Mustafa Halaika, 20, was killed Friday morning in the West Bank Arab village of Shuyukh, near Kiryat Arba, in what was described by villagers as an attack by five young armed Jews wearing civilian clothes and skullcaps. A 15-year-old boy and a 46-year-old man were wounded in the incident.
Maariv reported Sunday that a member of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s extremist Kach party boasted of the raid on Shuyukh. He was quoted as saying Kach did it to avenge the death of yeshiva student Eliezer Schlesinger, who was shot by an Arab girl in a Jerusalem park after midnight on Thursday.
But police said Sunday they were still in the dark about the circumstances surrounding the incident. The IDF confirmed there were no soldiers in Shuyukh at the time.
But troops were sent in when riots broke out in Shuyukh and nearby Si’ir village after the raid. Two Arab women were overcome by tear gas.
The eyewitnesses said the Israeli settlers entered the village Friday morning, smashed windows with rifle butts, broke into homes, clubbed people and vandalized furniture.
The intruders then allegedly opened fire, killing Halaika, and also fired on villagers trying to go to his aid. Finally, they fled toward the nearby Jewish settlement of Asfar, the witnesses said.
According to Maariv, the Kach activist told the newspaper that 11 people participated in the raid, some of whom fired toward the villagers’ homes.
“The youth was killed because he had left his home. Had he stayed at home, nothing would have happened,” the activist was quoted as saying.
The newspaper said its informant showed reporters maps, communications equipment and a Baretta pistol, and boasted that the entire operation took between 5 and 10 minutes.
ANOTHER KILLED NEAR RAMALLAH
Elsewhere in the West Bank, soldiers killed Mahmoud Ghanem, 26, during a stone-throwing incident in Saffa village, west of Ramallah.
Military sources said trouble began Friday evening, when a patrol was surrounded by villagers who hurled rocks at them.
An officer fired into the air and later into the crowd, killing Ghanem. According to the sources, the officer was in danger when he opened fire.
The general strike in the territories, in its third day Sunday, was occasioned by the 21st anniversary of the start of the Six-Day War and the latest visit to the Middle East by Shultz.
Shops were closed and public transportation was spotty. Only a handful of Arab day laborers went to their jobs in Israel.
But schools in the territories, reopened by the Israeli authorities last week after a three-month closure for security reasons, held classes as usual.
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