Another 300 sick in 'Phenomenon’

Press, 5 April 1983, Page 1

Another 300 sick in 'Phenomenon’

NZPA-Reuter Tel Aviv Three hundred Palestinian schoolchildren were taken to hospital yestereday in the latest wave of a mystery illness that West Bank Arabs say is caused by poisoning. The new cases of illness, in the West Bank towns of Tulkarm, Yatta, and Anabta, brought to 550 the riujnber of Palestinians, mostly schoolgirls, who have complained of nausea arid dizziness in the last few weeks. .Most Palestinians in the area believe Israel is somehow poisoning them. Israeli authorities reject the assertion, saying exhaustive investigation has produced no trace of poison. They blame the sickness on mass psychosis fomented by Jewish- ■ Arab tension in the West Bank and abetted by antiIsraeli provocateurs. The Health Ministry has asked two experts from the United States Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta to conduct a separate examination. A Red Cross official, Dr Franz Altherr, was quoted as saying he believed the illness was “a mass phenomenon.” Dr Altherr will present his findings to the Red Cross in Geneva. Palestinian unrest and closed shops meanwhile marked the remembrance of an East Sunday incident last year when two people died as a Jewish immigrant went on a shooting rampage. Two Israeli soldiers were

wounded by a hand grenade thrown outside a hospital in Nablus, the West Bank’s largest city, Israeli, security sources said. An Arab youth from the Al Aroub refugee camp near Hebron was treated for bullet wounds apparently suffered when an Israeli civilian opened fire on stone-throwing youths, the sources said. A Jewish youth, aged 17, identified as a member of the extremist nationalist Kach movement, was arrested for opening fire on Arabs in the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel Radio reported.