Hebron - Inter-communal Violence

Inter-communal Violence

See Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Hebron

Hebron was the one city excluded from the interim agreement of September 1995 to restore rule over all Palestinian West Bank cities to the Palestinian Authority. Since The Oslo Agreement, violent episodes have been recurrent in the city. The Cave of the Patriarchs massacre took place on February 25, 1994 when Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli physician and resident of Kiryat Arba, opened fire on Muslims at prayer in the Ibrahimi Mosque, killing 29, and wounding 125 before the survivors overcame and killed him. Standing orders for Israeli soldiers on duty in Hebron disallowed them from firing on fellow Jews, even if they were shooting Arabs. This event was condemned by the Israeli Government, and the extreme right-wing Kach party was banned as a result. The Israeli government also tightened restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in H2, closed their vegetable and meat markets, and banned Palestinian cars on Shuhada Street. The park near the Cave of the Patriarchs for recreation and barbecues is off-limits for Arab Hebronites.

Over the period of the First Intifada and Second Intifada the Jewish community was subjected to attacks by Palestinian militants, especially during the periods of the Intifadas; which saw 3 fatal stabbings and 9 fatal shootings in between the first and second Intifada (0.9% of all fatalities in Israel and the West Bank) and 17 fatal shootings (9 soldiers and 8 settlers) and 2 fatalities from a bombing during the second Intifada, and thousands of rounds fired on it from the hills above the Abu-Sneina and Harat al-Sheikh neighbourhoods. 12 Israeli soldiers were killed (Hebron Brigade commander Colonel Dror Weinberg and two other officers, 6 soldiers and 3 members of the security unit of Kiryat Arba) in an ambush. Two Temporary International Presence in Hebron observers were killed by Palestinian gunmen in a shooting attack on the road to Hebron On March 27, 2001, 16 days after settlers had celebrated Purim with a march through the city in which some settler children were dressed up as Baruch Goldstein, a Palestinian sniper targeted and killed the Jewish baby Shalhevet Pass. The sniper was caught in 2002.

In the 1980s Hebron became the center of the terrorist Kach movement, whose first first operations started there, and provided a model for similar behaviour in other settlements. Hebron is one of the three West Bank towns from where the majority of suicide bombers originate. In May 2003, three students of the Hebron Polytechnic University carried out three separate suicide attacks. In August 2003, a 29-year-old preacher from Hebron killed 23 and injured over 130 in a bus bombing in Jerusalem.