
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 9, 1994                   TAG: 9403090200
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder Newspapers
DATELINE: JERUSALEM                                LENGTH: Medium

WAS MASSACRE PREVENTABLE?

The slaughter of Muslim worshipers in Hebron could have been prevented if five of the six Israeli officers assigned to guard the contested religious site had arrived on time, Israel's top commander in the occupied West Bank said Tuesday.

Maj. Gen. Danny Yatom, testifying on the first day of hearings about the Feb. 25 massacre by Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein, said that one soldier and four border police officers apparently overslept that morning.

Yatom also told the special commission of inquiry that the Israeli army had not provided any intelligence briefings on the possibility of a Jewish act of terrorism against Arabs. All such briefings, he said, were geared to preventing Arab attacks on Jews, who also worship in Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs.

``Such an act by a madman is not something that, according to experience . . . we expected would happen at the Tomb of the Patriarchs or any other place,'' Yatom said.

Jewish violence against Arabs is not new in Hebron, a religiously charged city of 80,000 Palestinians and 400 Jews that has seen vicious assaults by both sides. The Tomb of the Patriarchs, in particular, has been a site of such skirmishes for more than a generation. The tomb, holy to both Muslims and Jews because it is considered the burial place of Abraham, Sarah and their descendants, has been claimed by adherents of both religions.

Still, even the compound's architecture was designed to protect Jews and not Arabs. The doors between the synagogue and the mosque open from the Jewish side into the Muslim side, not the reverse, according to testimony.

Yatom said Tuesday that the crucial security flaw was the absence of five Israeli officers from the site. Only one soldier was on duty inside the compound, where a second soldier and a border police officer also should have been stationed, and three other border police assigned to guard the compound's outside gates were absent, too, he said.

``In retrospect, my impression is the security plan provided a very good answer if it was executed. . . . I think in reality this plan could have prevented Goldstein's action, the massacre,'' Yatom said. ``And at least if it did not prevent it, it would have made it very difficult for this murderer to carry out his plot.''

Yatom testified that 29 Muslim worshipers were mowed down by Goldstein as they knelt in prayer inside, while five others were shot outside the mosque. Other estimates have put the death toll at 40 and even higher.

The massacre brought an abrupt halt to Arab-Israeli peace talks and unleashed a wave of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and soldiers that has left 31 more Palestinians dead. Two Jews also have died in the violence.

The investigating commission, made up of five judges and including the Israeli Supreme Court's president and an Israeli Arab judge from Nazareth, heard testimony Tuesday from a series of army officers. The hearings were broadcast on Israeli television and radio.

Though the commission's recommendations are not legally binding, the conclusions reached by such special panels traditionally have had a strong impact on Israeli politics.

Among the issues commissioners will examine are whether Goldstein was the only gunman inside the mosque.

by CNB