FROM OUR ARCHIVES

50 YEARS AGO

April 1, 1968

Fifty bus-stop signs were set up in Gaza by transport officials of the military government. Hitherto, buses stopped wherever passengers rang.

Astonishment was said to be prevalent in Saudi Arabia – astonishment that life in east Jerusalem and the areas occupied by Israel since the Six Day War had returned to normal, that the Israelis had not violated the Muslim holy places; that the residents of the occupied areas were permitted by the Israeli authorities to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and that as far as the Israeli authorities were concerned, Saudi Arabians and Muslims of any other country could come to visit Muslim holy places in Israel. This was reported by some 500 West Bank residents who returned to their homes via Allenby Bridge, after making the haj to Mecca. They said that in Saudi Arabia they had been besieged with questions about life with and under the Israelis, and that their favorable replies had obviously upset the preconceptions of many.

25 YEARS AGO

April 1, 1993

Hundreds of Palestinians were detained for violating the first day of the closure of the territories, as thousands of employers sought to replace Arab workers who could not make it to their jobs. The closure followed the murders of two traffic policemen and a contractor in Gaza. Palestinians from the administered territories were also barred from entering Israel in private vehicles. The Defense Ministry was examining the possibility of discharging hundreds of soldiers who were interested in going into construction work, following the acute shortage of construction workers created by the closure of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Many building sites, especially in the south, were paralyzed, while others worked with a skeleton crew. Building industry leaders held an emergency meeting in an effort to recruit at least 30,000 workers immediately.

The committee appointed by the Education Ministry to investigate the stabbing at the ORT-Kennedy School a week earlier, in which six pupils and a principal were injured, recommended that teachers licensed to carry weapons should bring them to school.

15 YEARS AGO

April 1, 2003

Former Shin Bet agent provocateur Avishai Raviv was acquitted by the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court for failing to notify authorities of Yigal Amir’s intention to assassinate prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp named the main square in their camp after the Iraqi army officer who carried out the first suicide attack against US forces in Iraq. Four marines were killed when the officer blew himself up near a military checkpoint in southern Iraq.

Facing questions that he brushed off advice from generals and underestimated the troops needed to attack Iraq, US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld called his critics “second guessers” who failed to appreciate the war’s success so far.

Two sisters, Hanna and Maria Khouri, 70 and 72, were found dead in a sealed room in their home in Shfaram. Police said the room in which they were found was sealed with plastic. This indicated that they might have died of asphyxiation. One month earlier, a mother and two of her children died for lack of oxygen in the sealed room of their home in Kafr Kasim. –Daniel Kra