About 100 Palestinian women and schoolgirls, many of them sobbing, staged a memorial march in the West Bank town of Hebron to commemorate the 29 Muslim worshippers massacred by a Jewish extremist seven years ago.
Many of them carried pictures of those slain on February 25, 1994, when Jewish militant Baruch Goldstein opened fire with an automatic weapon on Palestinians praying in the mosque in Hebron, a city that is a frequent flashpoint for violence.
"We will never forget your blood," some of the women chanted as they headed towards the town's cemetery to lay flowers on the graves of their loved-ones.
Goldstein, a New York-born doctor and member of the banned anti-Arab group Kach, killed 29 worshippers and injured dozens more before being killed by an enraged Palestinian crowd.
In 1999, the Israeli army tore down a shrine to Goldstein erected near his tomb in the Jewish settlement of Kyriat Arba southeast of Hebron, which had become a pilgrimage site for right-wing Israeli extremists and settlers.
Under a US-brokered agreement in January 1997, Israel withdrew its troops from four-fifths of Hebron, a city of 120,000 Arabs. It retained control of 20 percent of the city, where 400 zealous settlers and around 15,000 Palestinians live.
The city's Arab residents have been frequently living under an Israeli army imposed curfew since the outbreak of deadly Israeli-Palestinian violence in late September that has killed almost 420 people -- HEBRON (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
