Word: hebron
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...many citizens, the most dismaying revelation came at the beginning of the hearings from Deputy Commander Meir Tayar, who heads the paramilitary border police unit in Hebron. Standing orders, he said, forbade security forces from firing on Jewish settlers under any circumstances. He explained that if a settler opened fire, instructions were to "take cover and wait for the clip to finish, then stop him in some other way, not by shooting...
Tragic but simple: that was Israel's official characterization of last month's massacre of Muslim worshippers in Hebron. The killer, a Jewish settler, was portrayed as a singular lunatic acting alone. The episode, it was said, could not have been foreseen or prevented, and Israeli security forces responded properly. But after two weeks of hearings by a state commission examining the slaughter, it does not look so elementary anymore. Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron triggerman, is no longer the sole subject of suspicion, now that witnesses say a second man may have been involved. More broadly, an entire national mind...
...Friday, the U.N. Security Council unanimously condemned the Hebron massacre, and Syria, Jordan and Lebanon agreed to resume their negotiations with Israel. Though the P.L.O. still wanted "concrete measures" to protect Palestinians before it went back to the bargaining table, it agreed to a high- level meeting with Israel this week in Tunis...
...Tomb of the Patriarchs was an obvious tinderbox. The military governor of Hebron, Colonel Shalom Goldstein, testified that 25 "incidents of friction" between Jewish and Muslim worshippers had been recorded there in the past year. Yet security discipline was slack. On the morning of the massacre, five of the six men who were supposed to be guarding the inside of the mosque were absent. Three arrived late, which one of them acknowledged was a common occurrence...
After the Hebron massacre, Jibril Rajoub, an aide to P.L.O. chairman Yassir Arafat, announced that "This crazy man who murdered in Hebron today killed all possibilities of continuing the peace process." Arafat himself asked, "What kind of peace are you talking about if the crimes and killings against our people do not stop...