American Yeshiva Students Escape Attack in West Bank Town
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Version 0 of 1. JERUSALEM — Five American Jewish seminary students who strayed into a Palestinian-controlled area of Hebron in their car on Thursday were attacked by Palestinians hurling stones and a firebomb, according to the Israeli police and the military. But a potentially lethal episode in the volatile West Bank city was defused as the students, described by the Israeli news media as strictly Orthodox tourists from Brooklyn, found refuge in the home of a Palestinian man who said he used one of their phones to call the Israeli police. Fayez Abu Hamdiyeh, who lives in the Jabel Johar neighborhood of Hebron, told Maan, the independent Palestinian news agency, that he spotted the students, whom he believed to be Israeli settlers, fleeing from a group of Palestinian youths and that he took them into his home to protect them. The five yeshiva students, who were not immediately identified, had been on their way to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a contested site in Hebron revered by Jews and Muslims, but they lost their way, the Israeli police said. A police SWAT team that happened to be nearby arrived quickly, backed up by soldiers, and escorted the students from the area, said Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman. Two of the five students were said to have been slightly injured. Israeli television later showed images of their car in flames. Mr. Abu Hamdiyeh later told Ynet, an Israeli news site, that he and his family had ushered the five frightened tourists into their home and quickly closed the doors. He said he gave them water and tried to calm them down and assure them they were safe, “though none of them spoke Arabic.” Mr. Abu Hamdiyeh said his family sheltered the five for about 40 minutes until the Israeli forces arrived. Then, he said, both the tourists and the Israeli forces thanked him for what he termed a “humanitarian act.” “That’s how everybody should behave,” he said. “We don’t have problems with the Israelis and we don’t want problems.” A man identified only as one of the five tourists said in a short video interview posted on Ynet that he had come to Israel from the United States for four weeks. He was not named and his face was blurred. He described getting out of the car as it was attacked by stone-throwers and found himself in a crowd of Palestinians who he said were shouting, “Jew, Jew, Jew.” “Then one man came up to me and told me to come with him, up the hill,” he said, describing how he ended up in Mr. Abu Hamdiyeh’s home. Hebron has long been a focal point of tensions and violence as the only predominantly Palestinian town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that has a Jewish settlement at its core. Under the terms of the peace accords of the 1990s it remains divided into parts controlled by either the Israeli military or the Palestinian Authority. Jewish history dates back centuries in Hebron. Today, several hundred Jews live in small enclaves in the heart of the city among about 200,000 Palestinians. The once-bustling market area around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque, has become something of a ghost town since Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Israeli doctor, massacred 29 Muslim worshipers at the site in 1994. |