Word: stripped
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...after the Beit Lid bombing, Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shkaki spoke with Time correspondent Lara Marlowe in Damascus, giving a chilling picture of how he says the attack was planned. Though he disclaimed direct responsibility, he was obviously pleased, grinning and laughing throughout the interview. Born in the Gaza Strip, Shkaki, 44, joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative Islamist group, while studying medicine in Egypt in the '70s. He returned to the Gaza Strip in 1981 and founded Islamic Jihad. Shkaki's movement set itself apart from other groups with similar names by staging suicide attacks in Israel...
...attack would take place? SHKAKI: This is something I will not talk about [he grins]. TIME: Did you know Anwar Soukar and Salah Shaaker, the bombers? SHKAKI: By chance I knew Salah Shaaker. When he was a boy, he used to come to my home in the Gaza Strip; his older brothers were in the nucleus of the movement. But I myself did not choose the bombers. This was the work of our military branch. Some of the youths insist they want to lead a suicide operation--perhaps because they are influenced by the teachings of Islamic Jihad. My orders...
Worse than the blood-soaked statistics is the growing fear on both sides that nothing will improve. Palestinians and their Arab allies are increasingly persuaded that Israel has no intention of expanding self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho to the rest of the West Bank. Planned Palestinian elections are six months overdue, and Israel has yet to move any of its occupying troops out of the territory. After Beit Lid, Arafat also blamed Palestinian militants for the delays. Said he: ``Every time we get nearer to retrieving in our hands the West Bank and extending the national authority...
About all Rabin could offer is more security measures. As he has done after every attack, he temporarily shut Israel's borders to Palestinian workers, barring 40,000 of them from crossing daily from the West Bank and Gaza Strip--a form of collective punishment that serves only to inflame Palestinian anger. More than a hundred alleged militants were rounded up in the West Bank. Security forces were allowed to continue the tough interrogation tactics introduced after the Tel Aviv bus bombing. Since then the Israelis have arrested 1,500 Palestinians and claim that information extracted from the detainees...
Israel also redoubled pressure on Arafat to crack down on Islamic militants operating out of the semi-autonomous Gaza Strip. To date, the P.L.O. chairman has treated the Islamists gingerly for fear of igniting a Palestinian civil war. Israeli officials expressed hope that now he would get tough. Palestinian security forces have rounded up 20 alleged Islamic Jihad activists. Nabil Shaath, Arafat's planning minister, swore, ``This time, it will not be a show [detention] for two or three days...