Word: nablus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...leniency shown to Ben-Eze, who apparently was guaranteed admission so long as he could raise his ‘Academic Index’ to the bare minimum tolerated by Ivy League bylaws. I couldn’t tell you if the New York Times makes it to Nablus in hard copy, but at Web cafés around the world, aspiring scholars learned that Harvard will compromise for students who show enough promise—at basketball.It is hard to deny that the school’s resources could be better spent reaching out to those academically capable students...
...Israelis, the West Bank's main battlefield is Nablus. An ancient city of 134,000 people boxed in by tall hills and scores of Israeli checkpoints, Nablus is dubbed by Israelis the "Capital of Terror." One officer says, "If I gave my men so much as a 15 minute break from their duties, there would be a bomb leaving Nablus on its way to Tel Aviv." No kidding: the IDF says that at the Nablus checkpoints last year, soldiers discovered 31 bombs, four guns and six grenades. And the Israelis claim that they destroyed 14 explosives labs in Nablus alone...
...Nablus battalion headquarters of the IDF, the senior officer has a display case with bottles of champagne and wine, each a gift from his superiors, each tagged with the name of a terrorist captured or killed. The Israelis rely on a web of informers for information. Saleh Abdul Jawad, a political science professor at Birzeit University, says Israel has "tens of thousands" of Palestinian informers on its payroll. Some keep tabs on who prays at mosques, while others burrow into militant cells, planting bugs and betraying planned actions to their controllers. "Every small part of Palestinian life is under Shin...
Israel's success, however, is far from total. "Every time we cross one off [the list of wanted men], a new replacement pops up," says an officer in Nablus, wearily. For the IDF, the catch is this: because of Israel's tough tactics and the daily humiliations Palestinians must endure, anger at the occupier gets continually restoked, which makes the job of the militant ideologues that much easier...