Police cleansing Israel of Arab workers

Police cleansing Israel of Arab workers

JERUSALEM (Reuter): Police are cleansing Israel of Palestinian workers from the occupied territories, sealed off following two deadly Arab guerrilla attacks, Police Minister Moshe Shahal said yesterday.

Shahal, trying to reassure Israelis shaken by revenge attacks for the Hebron mosque massacre, told Israel Radio security forces were tightening a closure first imposed after a Jewish settler killed 30 Moslem worshipers on Feb. 25.

"The difference this time is that Israeli police have been carrying out an operation over the past few days, in what is called cleansing the area of residents of the territories who stay in Israel without permits," he said.

In a separate radio interview Shahal said the operation had been expanded since Thursday night to include Palestinian workers with permits to remain overnight in Israel.

"Every day several hundred residents of the territories, some of whom have been in Israel for months, are transferred to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank," he said.

Israel on Thursday banned Palestinians from entering the Jewish state, just hours after a Moslem gunman shot dead one Israeli and wounded four on Israel's Holocaust memorial day. A soldier killed the guerrilla.

The incident in the southern port of Ashdod came less than 24 hours after a suicide car bombing by the Islamic Hamas organization killed seven Israelis in Afula, northern Israel.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called his security cabinet to an emergency meeting yesterday. Shahal said further measures to protect Israelis from Arab attacks would be on the agenda.

"One of our recommendations is to prevent the entry of (Arab) vehicles from the territories, not only during the period of the closure, but completely," he said.

Israel has said the attacks will not affect its talks with the PLO on starting Palestinian self-rule and an Israeli troop withdrawal in the Gaza Strip and an enclave around Jericho, in the West Bank.

But Israel and the United States voiced dissatisfaction that PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat did not condemn the killings.

Shahal said the Israeli economy must learn to cope without a Palestinian work force numbering in the tens of thousands that has been the backbone of the building industry and agriculture.

"We once knew how to get along without workers from the territories and we can do so again," he said.

But Shahal acknowledged that Israelis had not answered the government's previous calls to take manual jobs in construction and farming and that employers had complained after past closures about a shortage of workers.

In the West Bank town of Ramallah, a local leader of Arafat's Fatah faction criticized the new clampdown. "This is part of a collective punishment," Hussein al-Sheikh said.

Former Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon, a right-wing opponent of the peace deal with the PLO, said the current wave of violence was only the beginning of greater bloodshed.

"It's child's play compared with the terrorism that will come after the terrorists are allowed in," he said, referring to a planned deployment of Palestinian police in Gaza and Jericho.