[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 137 (Saturday, September 28, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11630-S11632]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      BLOODSHED IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, the United States has played a central role 
in the quest for peace in the Middle East, and in recent years we have 
seen remarkable progress. I will never forget standing on the White 
House lawn to witness the handshake that is etched in our memories 
between Israel's late Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Arafat, 
signaling the beginning of a new partnership to end decades of 
bloodshed.
  We had high hopes then, and I am among those who believe in the 
durability of the peace process. But the recent explosion of violence 
between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza, the worst 
fighting since the 1993 peace accord, threatens to undermine the 
advancements that have been made and stability in a region of vital 
importance to the United States.
  We have seen rock throwing crowds, Palestinian police firing on 
Israeli soldiers, Israeli helicopter gunships spraying bullets into 
houses and at unarmed civilians, gruesome photographs of the dead and 
wounded, and the look of terror on children's faces.
  There is ample blame to go around. Under cover of darkness and 
without warning, the Israeli Government opened a tourist tunnel that 
runs virtually under a holy site revered by both Israelis and 
Palestinians. A mob response by Palestinians escalated into a firefight 
between Palestinian police and Israeli troops.
  Even before this latest crisis, the shift in policy of Prime Minister 
Netanyahu on West Bank settlements reinforced the apprehension of 
Palestinians that Israel would not fulfill the agreements entered into 
by the Rabin and Peres governments.
  The Israelis in turn can point to continued acts of terrorism and 
extremely hostile statements by its Arab neighbors have contributed to 
an atmosphere of increasing insecurity.

  Mr. President, if we have learned anything in the Middle East, it is 
that violence will not solve the age old problems there. While I fully 
respect the decision of the majority of the Israeli people to change 
their leaders, I do not believe that the election signified a decision 
to abandon the peace process. Indeed, Prime Minister Netanyahu has 
indicated that he has no intention of doing so. His intentions, and his 
leadership, are being tested now.
  The situation could not be more fragile. There is tremendous distrust 
on both sides. Each suspects the other of seeking advantage, and of 
failing to live up to prior commitments. As President Clinton has 
stressed, this is a time for both sides to refrain from provocative 
actions. The focus should be on emphasizing the positive, not 
accentuating the negative.
  Mr. President, I know others believe as I do that the peace process 
can survive this latest catastrophe. But many lives have been lost in 
the past 2\1/2\ days, and many innocent people have suffered. For our 
part, the Congress should do everything possible to urge restraint, to 
renew our pledge to support the efforts for peace of both Israelis and 
Palestinians, and to condemn the extremists on both sides who would 
seek to sabotage these efforts.
  Among the concrete steps we can take is to ensure that U.S. 
assistance to the Palestinians goes forward. With unemployment in the 
West Bank and Gaza estimated at over 60 percent, there is an urgent 
need to show the Palestinians that the peace process will lead to 
tangible improvements in their lives. These improvements can be the 
best engines of peace.
  Mr. President, I want to commend President Clinton for his remarks on 
Thursday, and to urge him to continue to use his influence with both 
sides to stop the bloodshed.
  I ask unanimous consent that two articles from today's Washington 
Post, describing the deadly actions by both sides, be printed in the 
Record.
  There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 28, 1996]

In Gaza, Civilians Flee in Terror, as Helicopters Attack From Night Sky

                          (By John Lancaster)

       Rafah, Gaza Strip, September 27.--Barely visible against 
     the night sky, the Israeli military helicopter hovered 
     several hundred feet above a darkened Rafah neighborhood. The 
     beat of its rotors mixed with crack of gunshots as Israeli 
     border troops exchanged fire with armed Palestinians hidden 
     in nearby buildings.
       Two Palestinian youths, eager to display their battlefield 
     knowledge, argued about the model of the U.S.-made chopper 
     that hung over the rooftops. ``Apache,'' said one. ``No, 
     no,'' insisted the other. ``Cobra.''
       Suddenly, the debate seemed academic.
       With no warning and in the absence of any apparent threat 
     from the young men gathered in a sandy alley--without visible 
     weapons or involvement in the exchange of gunfire--the 
     helicopter opened fire in a terrifying, thunderous burst that 
     sent everybody scrambling for cover at the base of a 
     concrete-block wall. A moment or two later, in the midst of 
     another volley, a young man several feet away clutched his 
     forehead with both hands and fell to his knees, his face a 
     mask of crimson.
       ``I'm hit! I'm hit!'' he screamed.
       Things had not started out this way. For the better part of 
     the day, calm seemed to prevail in the teeming, semi-
     autonomous Gaza Strip. Residents observed the Muslim day of 
     rest. Palestinian police politely dispersed crowds of teens 
     who gathered to

[[Page S11631]]

     throw stones at Israeli troops. That was in sharp contrast to 
     Thursday's armed clashes that killed 24 Palestinians and five 
     Israelis in Gaza.
       By late in the day, however, violence had again erupted in 
     Gaza. The flash point this time was Rafah, a ramshackle town 
     of potholed roads and half-finished concrete building that 
     serves as the gateway between Egypt and the Palestinian self-
     rule area in the Gaza Strip. The border crossing is guarded 
     by Palestinians on one side and Egyptians on the other, with 
     Israeli troops manning posts in between.
       Witnesses said the trouble began around 3 p.m., when large 
     crowds of young people began throwing stones at the Israeli 
     posts. According to the witnesses, the Israelis then open 
     fire on the crowds. Next, armed Palestinian civilians began 
     returning fire from nearby buildings.
       [The Israeli army said shots also were fired from the 
     Egyptian side and that the helicopter gunships were called in 
     to rescue trapped soldiers after an Israeli colonel was 
     killed and six soldiers were wounded, the Associated Press 
     reported.] The accounts could not be independently confirmed.
       Palestinians in Rafah said their police at least tried to 
     avert the clash. ``The Palestinian police tried to stop me,'' 
     said Akram Louli, 21, a student at the Islamic University in 
     Gaza who was among the stone-throwers. ``They told me, `Leave 
     this area and go away.' ''
       But the police also appeared to be doing their best to 
     avoid confrontation with the protesters. ``They were so 
     polite,'' Louli said, adding that when they asked him to 
     leave, ``I told them, `No, I don't want to go,' so they left 
     me and went to push away some other kids.''
       Ahmed Hassan, a 25-year-old policeman, said he and his 
     fellow patrolmen were ``trying to calm down the situation'' 
     on orders from the Rafah police captain. But he added: ``The 
     people have too much anger. They are very courageous. They 
     are not listening to the police.''
       Louli, the student, seemed to confirm as much when he vowed 
     that he would be on the streets the next day. ``I am planning 
     to do the same thing I did today,'' he said to murmurs of 
     approval from the young men at his side. ``The incidents are 
     going to be bigger.''
       The city seemed relatively calm at dusk. Shops were open, 
     and children played on piles of sand used in construction. 
     Closer to the border crossing, however, the streets grew 
     dark, residents and shopkeepers having turned out many of 
     their lights.
       A moment later it was clear why. Two young men, one 
     carrying a rock in each hand, waved down our vehicle and 
     told us to douse the headlights. They said the lights 
     could draw fire from the helicopters, which could be heard 
     plainly. Other drivers apparently had heeded the same 
     advice; occasionally they flashed their lights to 
     illuminate an intersection or perhaps a child.
       On a side road, the gunfire became louder, and it seemed 
     prudent to go no farther. We stopped the car and darted into 
     a sandy alley where perhaps 20 teenagers and young men were 
     leaning against a building. Cocksure and chatty, the youths 
     said the helicopters had been firing on the area 
     sporadically, displaying several large brass cartridges that 
     they said had come from their cannons.
       They said the gunfire from the buildings came not from 
     Palestinian police but from armed civilians who had ignored 
     police orders to leave the area.
       After a few minutes, one of the men offered to show a 
     nearby home that he said had been fired on by a helicopter. 
     The owner, Talal Salah, led the way into a cramped rear 
     bedroom, then pointed to a fist-sized hole in the ceiling 
     that he said had been caused by shrapnel from an Israeli 
     cannon shell at 5:30 p.m. Salah, 35, said his two small 
     children were lying on the bed at the time but escaped 
     injury.
       We left the home in a large group, and as we emerged from 
     the narrow alley in front of the house, the helicopter opened 
     fire. The young men's cockiness suddenly vanished. The 
     chopper fired perhaps three more bursts. It was after one of 
     them that the young man clutched his forehead and fell to the 
     ground.
       In a panic, his companions rushed to his side. ``The car! 
     The car!'' they yelled, indicating they wanted to take the 
     injured man to the hospital. As they carried him to the car, 
     however, the helicopter unleashed another volley and the 
     crowd scattered. Several people ran down the street away from 
     the car, feeling nearly naked under the light of a street 
     lamp that had not been turned off.
       After running for perhaps 50 yards, I was welcomed into a 
     small restaurant by a man pointing to the sky in warning. A 
     girl of perhaps 4 peeked out from the door of a makeshift 
     home. After offering a glass of water, one of the people 
     inside guided me to a nearby hospital, where I found my 
     Palestinian journalist companion and the injured man.
       ``It's not safe here,'' the journalist said, guiding me to 
     his car before I could inquire about the man's condition. 
     ``We should leave.''
                                                                    ____


               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 28, 1996]

  Palestinians, Israeli Police Battle on Sacred Ground--Clashes Cool 
               Elsewhere as Guns Meet Stones in Jerusalem

                          (By Barton Gellman)

       Jerusalem, September 27.--Israeli police and border guards 
     this afternoon stormed Jerusalem's Temple Mount, a holy site 
     for both Muslims and Jews, and shot dead three young men as a 
     stone-throwing crowd of worshipers emerged from Friday 
     prayers at al-Aqsa mosque. The clash brought the third day of 
     bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians to an emotional 
     crescendo at the plot of ground that embodies their national 
     and religious divide.
       But even after that incendiary clash, or perhaps because of 
     its implications, the two sides stepped back carefully from 
     confrontation elsewhere. In all, nine people died in street 
     battles today, according to hospitals and Israeli and 
     Palestinian officials, and a major gun battle raged tonight 
     in the Gaza border town of Rafah between armed Palestinians 
     and Israeli troops, who opened fire on groups of civilians 
     from helicopter gunships. But direct firefights involving 
     uniformed Palestinian police nearly ceased, and forces loyal 
     to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat planted themselves 
     between demonstrators and Israeli troops in Nablus and 
     Ramallah in the West Bank and in many parts of the Gaza 
     Strip.
       After a three-day death toll of 66--52 Palestinians and 14 
     Israelis--both sides seemed headed back from the brink of 
     genuine war. The sullen stalemate to which they returned 
     sounded much the same as the one that began the week, and it 
     was not obvious tonight whether the traumas that intervened 
     had done more to harden their positions or to spur them 
     toward new political steps.
       ``Maybe we've gotten through it,'' said an exhausted U.S. 
     consul general in Jerusalem, Edward Abington, who worked 
     through the night on Thursday and all day today to broker a 
     still-unscheduled summit between Arafat and Israeli Prime 
     Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. ``I don't know for sure, but 
     it's a possibility.''
       Netanyahu, in his first public remarks since returning from 
     an aborted European tour, accused Arafat's Palestinian 
     Authority of ``willful and untruthful incitement'' against 
     the Jewish state. ``I tell him today: Our hand is stretched 
     out to you in peace, but we will not agree that during the 
     negotiations there will be a war option too,'' the premier 
     said in a news conference with his security chiefs, 
     maintaining that the Palestinians were using the threat of 
     violence to extract concessions.
       After two days of telephone diplomacy by Secretary of State 
     Warren Christopher, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns 
     said the United States believes a meeting between Netanyahu 
     and Arafat ``will be held very soon.''
       According to witnesses on both ends of a 30-minute phone 
     call between Netanyahu and Arafat after 2 a.m. (8 p.m. EDT 
     Thursday), the Israeli leader warned Arafat to put a stop to 
     Palestinian police rifle fire at Israeli forces and said he 
     would use ``every means available'' to respond if it resumed. 
     Netanyahu deployed tanks and armored personnel carriers 
     outside Nablus, Ramallah and Jericho to underscore the 
     threat, and hawks in his cabinet said he had waited too long 
     already and should use them.
       But the worst violence of the day came in the old style of 
     the six-year uprising against Israeli occupation that began 
     in 1987: Palestinians threw rocks on the Temple Mount, and 
     Israeli forces responded with overwhelming force.
       The Temple Mount--where the third-holiest mosque in Islam 
     rises over the Western Wall, which is Judaism's most sacred 
     site--was regarded from the start as today's greatest risk. 
     Israel ringed the walled Old City with more than 3,500 police 
     and border police, who stopped and frisked young Arab men all 
     morning.
       With Arafat calling for a return to calm, fewer worshipers 
     than usual--well under 10,000--turned out today at the 
     sprawling al-Aqsa mosque, which faces the Dome of the Rock 
     across a broad plaza. Mohammed Hussein, who delivered the 
     sermon inside the 8th-century mosque and by loudspeaker 
     audible for blocks, said the Netanyahu government committed 
     ``a crime against God'' by completing a tunnel adjacent to 
     the outer wall of the Temple Mount, which Muslims call Haram 
     Sharif.
       ``These are great confrontations for al-Aqsa,'' he said, 
     voice booming. ``It's your religious duty to defend al-
     Aqsa.''
       Israeli Internal Security Minister Avigdor Kahalani, in an 
     interview at the scene, said his troops did not open fire 
     until worshipers departing the mosque threw ``thousands and 
     thousands of stones at police'' standing at the gates and at 
     Jews standing on the Western Wall plaza below. ``We're not 
     going to turn the other cheek,'' he said, adding that police 
     had responded with ``a little gas'' and ``a few rubber 
     bullets.'' He denied categorically that live ammunition had 
     been used.
       That account conflicted with some of the physical evidence 
     and the recollections of witnesses atop the Temple Mount, 
     including a Dutch relief worker interviewed at Makassed 
     Hospital in East Jerusalem. There were no stones visible on 
     the Western Wall plaza, and Jewish witnesses there said none 
     or nearly none had fallen. Many stones were scattered atop 
     the Temple Mount, but they were concentrated in the central 
     plaza as if thrown at targets who were already inside.
       Palestinian and a few foreign witnesses, corroborated in 
     parts by amateur videotape shot on the mount, said hundreds 
     of Israeli troops rushed in swinging clubs and fired hundreds 
     of rounds of steel-cored rubber bullets, which can be lethal 
     at close range. Doctors at Makassed Hospital, where three of 
     the wounded Palestinians died and 48 others were admitted, 
     allowed reporters to inspect X-rays demonstrating that some 
     of the

[[Page S11632]]

     wounded had been struck by conventional high-velocity rounds 
     from Israeli M-16 assault rifles.
       For more than an hour after the confrontation, wounded 
     Palestinians were carried out in haste through stone 
     alleyways toward the gates of the Old City. Frantic friends 
     and relatives raced toward the hospital with a women bleeding 
     from the head, a man unconscious on a stretcher, an old man 
     in a wheelchair with bleeding wounds in the chest and arm, 
     another old man bleeding from the head and several more 
     injured.
       Many worshipers were still praying inside al-Aqsa mosque 
     when the confrontation began outside. Some of those on the 
     plaza ran back inside, and the Israeli forces fired through 
     the doors and open windows, causing many more casualties.
       ``Bullets were flying over our heads,'' said Hussein Adib, 
     47. ``The rugs on which we were praying were covered with 
     blood.''
       If the Temple Mount was the day's great failure, Nablus was 
     its success. Six Israeli soldiers died there Thursday at 
     Joseph's Tomb, traditional burial place of the biblical 
     patriarch and an island of Jewish control in the 
     Palestinian self-ruled town. By nightfall Thursday, about 
     40 Israeli soldiers remained, surrounded by hundreds of 
     Palestinian troops.
       On-scene negotiations through the night between Maj. Gen. 
     Uzi Dayan, chief of Israel's Central Command, and Maj. Gen. 
     Haj Ismail Jabber, chief of the Palestinian West Bank police, 
     worked out a cease-fire. This morning, when demonstrators 
     from the Balata Refugee Camp tried to resume the attack, 
     senior Palestinian Authority leaders linked arms and, backed 
     by Palestinian troops in riot gear, stood between the angry 
     crowd and its Israeli targets. Similar scenes played out in 
     Jenin and Ramallah.
       There were a few places in the territories today where 
     uniformed Palestinian troops joined again in attacks on 
     Israeli soldiers. Two Israeli border guards and a Palestinian 
     policeman died in a gun battle outside the northern West Bank 
     town of Tulkarm, and Palestinian policemen helped attempt to 
     storm an Israeli army post outside the self-ruled town of 
     Jericho.
       In Gaza, Palestinian police appeared to make a genuine 
     effort to avert further clashes, though there was some 
     question as to how far they were willing to go to rein in 
     angry Palestinian youths.
       Near the Erez crossing point, scene of some of Thursday's 
     bloodiest battles, about 30 armed Palestinian police in olive 
     drab uniforms formed a cordon across the road to keep out 
     potential protesters.
       Protesters did converge on another potential flash point, 
     the crossroad leading to the Jewish settlement of Netzarim. 
     But police prevented them from getting anywhere near the 
     Israeli posts.
       In some cases, police officers handled the mostly youthful 
     protesters with almost fatherly indulgence, sometimes draping 
     an arm around a shoulder to emphasize their eagerness to 
     avoid confrontation.
       ``What we had yesterday was enough,'' explained police 
     Capt. Shaban Awad. ``Fifty killed--it's enough. We want to 
     avoid more violence.''
       In Jerusalem the tunnel that sparked three days of lethal 
     conflict was closed to tourists today.
       In many parts of Israel and the Palestinian self-rule 
     territories, attention turned from fighting to burying the 
     dead. Israeli Staff Sgt. Itamar Sudai, who died at Joseph's 
     Tomb Thursday, was laid to rest at Mount Herzl with eulogies 
     from top army brass and a tribute from a survivor of the 
     battle there.
       ``My brother,'' said the young soldier, identified only as 
     Uri, ``you've gone before me. All our dreams were so close to 
     being realized. So close and in a minute, everything's 
     gone.''

  Mr. COVERDELL addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
  Mr. COVERDELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent I be allowed to 
speak up to 10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________