PALESTINE/ISRAEL: American Jewwish students protected by a Palestinian...

U.S. Jewish seminary students escape attack on West Bank

By Isabel Kershner
New York Times

Posted:   09/03/2015 12:01:00 AM CDT | Updated:   a day ago

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 Israeli news media as Orthodox tourists from New York, found refuge in the home of a Palestinian man who said he used one of their phones to call Israeli police.

Fayez Abu Hamdiyeh, who lives in the Jabel Johar neighborhood of Hebron, told Maan, an 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.

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. It has become something of a ghost town since Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Israeli doctor, massacred 29 Muslim worshippers at the site in 1994.