Word: hebron
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When Palestinian security forces moved into the lawless West Bank towns of Jenin and Nablus, all they had to worry about were the armed criminal gangs who had been shaking down shopkeepers and stealing cars - it didn't take long to wrest control from the thugs. But Hebron, where 600 Palestinian forces rolled up over the weekend in shiny new white pick-up trucks, is far more dangerous, because it is a stronghold of Hamas and also the base of an extremist Jewish settler community. The Islamists see the new paramilitary unit as a U.S.- and Israeli-built proxy force...
...peace agreement. So far, the plan has succeeded: The streets are safer for ordinary Palestinians, and Israelis have more confidence in their Palestinian security counterparts. But it's precisely because this unit forms part of a plan to prepare the Palestinians to take control of the area that the Hebron settlers are so vehemently opposed - they have no interest in a two-state solution that would transfer land that they see at their Biblical birthright to Palestinian control...
...Many Hebronites now support the armed resistance preached by Islamic militants, and although Hamas has been driven underground by Israeli raids and arrests, it remains a powerful force in the city. Hebron sources told TIME that Hamas will try to sabotage the deployment of the new Palestinian security forces by staging attacks on the Israeli settlers or military, which could lead to a backlash against the U.S.-sponsored security force. Says a Hamas spokesman: "We are opposed to the Palestinian security apparatus. Its aim is to serve Israeli interests by arresting Hamas activists." But with Israeli forces raiding suspected Hamas...
...road dips and rises through the Hebron hills, white etched with the glowing green of vineyards, the turn-off to Edna village is marked by the grey, concrete watchtower of an Israeli checkpoint. But it doesn't deter Israeli-Arab lawyer Khaled Kasab Mahameed from his quixotic mission: He has come to the West Bank to educate Palestinians about the Jewish Holocaust...
...when Bethlehem was a town in a sleepy province of the Ottoman Empire, a local man built a magnificent house on the main road from Jerusalem to Hebron. Made from the region's limestone-whose shades, from pale honey to dazzling white, give the Holy Land its distinctive palette-the house was built around courtyards and fountains in the Ottoman style; frescoes and mosaics graced its walls and ceilings. In the 1930s, the man's family went bankrupt. The house was later used as a prison by the British, when they governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate...