Nablus

In a pre-dawn raid today, Israeli soldiers pounded on doors in this West Bank village and took 24 Palestinian suspects away in blindfolds and handcuffs. "We want to show the local citizens that we are in control," said 2nd Lt. Uziyah, 22, a red-bereted paratrooper. An American aid worker said soldiers kicked and slapped some detainees. The raids were aimed partly at West Bank villages that have declared themselves "liberated" Palestinian enclaves. More than 30 have been raided since Sunday and scores of Palestinians detained in the crackdown to arrest organizers of the uprising.

Farouk Altif is looking for a good Samaritan, or even an average one, so long as she's of marriageable age and willing. Altif is himself a Samaritan, part of a tiny and ancient nation that is gamely hanging onto survival in the Holy Land. His particular problem is that among Samaritans, women are scarce; males outnumber females by a ratio of about 5 to 3. Indeed, Samaritans in general are scarce--only 529 are known to exist. There are probably more Good Samaritan hospitals in the world than there are Samaritans.

Israel's military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, has forced a colonel to resign after investigations of attacks on Palestinians by soldiers under the officer's command, a military source said Monday. The daily newspaper Maariv said it was the harshest action taken in more than a decade against an officer of such high rank serving in the occupied territories. The military source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Col. Yehuda Meir decided to step down and leave the army after Shomron told him he must either quit or stand trial.

Suddenly, it is becoming an uprising of mere boys and girls, some barely old enough to spell the word intifada. In Nablus, a hard-core center of anti-Israeli protest on the West Bank, street captains in their 20s have organized younger followers, some as young as 8, in units that parade in the streets. They sometimes wear makeshift uniforms: trash bags pulled over their clothing, along with the traditional checkered Arab headdress.

The Israeli army imposed a curfew in the West Bank's largest city after a Palestinian was fatally stabbed, and troops wounded 14 Arabs in a series of clashes, military and hospital officials said. Residents of Nablus said the stabbing victim, 35-year-old Athad abu Ghosh, may have been killed by fellow Arabs for allegedly collaborating with Israeli authorities.

Israeli troops shot and wounded eight Palestinians on Monday during an Arab strike in the occupied territories and imposed a curfew on 120,000 residents in and around Nablus, the largest city in the West Bank. The curfew followed the overnight killing of a Palestinian by Israeli troops at the Askar camp in the Nablus area.

Striking Palestinians shut down Nablus, the West Bank's largest city, for the second straight day today, and Arabs across the occupied territories demonstrated against Israel's deportation policy and conditions at an isolated detention center.

Another Palestinian died Wednesday of wounds suffered Jan. 5, when he was shot in the neck during a confrontation with Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip refugee camp of Maghazi. An army spokesman identified the dead man as Emad Hamlawi, 20, a resident of the camp. His death brings to at least 51 the total of Palestinian fatalities since the uprising began in the Israeli-occupied territories Dec. 9.

Israeli troops, firing to disperse demonstrators on the West Bank, wounded a Palestinian woman Wednesday as Israeli Arabs staged a general strike to protest what they called the government's "apartheid" policies. The strike by Arabs living inside Israel's pre-1967 borders was not meant to extend into the occupied West Bank or Gaza Strip, where another 1.4 million Palestinians live under Israeli military rule.