Three More Arabs Killed Tuesday, As Soldiers Complain to Shamir

Three more Palestinian youths died Tuesday as a result of clashes with the Israel Defense Force.

The latest deaths brought to nine the number of fatalities since the beginning of a weekend of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Tuesday’s victims were identified as Samer el-Kassen, 17, shot to death in Jenin; Ibrahim Abu-Siam, 17, killed during rioting in the Farah refugee camp, near Nablus; and Issa el-Manasra of Bani Naim village, who died in East Jerusalem’s Mokassed Hospital of wounds inflicted during a clash with soldiers 10 days ago.

Premier Yitzhak Shamir, who visited Nablus on Tuesday, was told by soldiers there that military regulations were routinely violated in efforts to suppress the uprising.

They alleged that neither the senior officers nor the politicians know what is really going on. And they told the prime minister that a political solution is urgently needed.

The IDF, meanwhile, is determined to “go all the way” to end “the plague” of rock-throwing attacks, according to the army advocate general, Amnon Strashnov.

Three houses were demolished in the West Bank on Tuesday and two were sealed off. According to the IDF, they belonged to five young Palestinians, alleged to be members of a “rock-throwing cell,” whose attacks injured Jewish bus and car passengers in the territory.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin attributed the recent rise in casualties to the reopening of high schools in the territories.

The West Bank civil administration closed seven schools Tuesday as a punitive measure. They had been reopened less than a week, after a prolonged shutdown.

The administration threatened to close any school whose students participated in demonstrations, even if it meant “a whole school year goes down the drain.”