A 14-year-old youth was killed Tuesday in the West Bank town of Kalkilya, and disturbances were reported in other parts of the territories, as the Palestinians marked the end of the eighth month of their uprising.
Three residents of the village of Beit Rima, in the Ramallah region, were wounded as the Israel Defense Force entered the village to detain suspects. According to military sources, the soldiers were pelted with stones and opened fire when their lives were in danger.
Another youth was wounded by IDF fire in the village of Silat a-Hartiya, near Jenin.
As riots and a general strike continued in the territories, U.S. envoy Richard Murphy continued his Middle East diplomatic tour, in an apparent effort to reach some progress in the U.S. peace initiative of Secretary of State George Shultz before elections are held in Israel and the United States.
Murphy, the assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs, met Jordanian Prime Minister Zaid al-Rifai in Amman on Tuesday. He was expected to discuss King Hussein’s decision to sever all legal and administrative ties with the West Bank. A meeting with Hussein also was expected.
Israeli correspondents reported from Cairo, where Murphy was expected to arrive Tuesday, that there was yet no indication that the planned meeting there between Murphy and a Palestinian delegation would take place.
According to those reports, the Palestine Liberation Organization imposed a veto on such a meeting, because the Americans refused to have PLO members included in the delegation. Salah Khalaf, a deputy to PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, was quoted in those reports.
The meeting was to be held with a joint delegation of Palestinians from the territories and Palestinians with American citizenship. Attorney Fayez Abu Rahme of Gaza has been spending time in Cairo trying to push for the meeting.
But Hanna Siniora, the editor of the East Jerusalem daily A1-Fajr, said he would not go to Cairo unless explicitly invited by both the Americans and the PLO.
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