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Saturday Morning News

Middle East Violence Escalates into Major Military Operation

Aired October 7, 2000 - 9:00 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

LINDA STOUFFER, CNN ANCHOR: In our news right now, there is violence between Israeli forces and Palestinian protesters along several new fronts this morning. In the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian was shot and killed and several others wounded in a clash with Israeli soldiers.

And Palestinian guerrillas claim to have captured several Israeli soldiers, that's near the border with Lebanon, all said to avenge the death of a Palestinian boy.

CNN's Jerrold Kessel is in Jerusalem now. He has the very latest on what's happening there.

Jerrold, hello.

JERROLD KESSEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Linda, no confirmation from the Israeli military about that report from Lebanon of Hezbollah guerrillas kidnapping Israeli soldiers. But we do know that there is a major military action in that area of southeast Lebanon and northeast Israel on that border area.

This would be the first time that there has been such a clash between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, with Hezbollah having apparently shelled at a number of Israeli positions in that area. We're told that by the Israeli army, the first time since in May Israel carried out its unilateral withdrawal after its long occupation in south Lebanon.

There was also a clash at another point along the Israeli- Lebanese border this morning, and one Palestinian confirmed shot dead, another in critical condition. The Palestinian refugees from inside Lebanon have come to the border fence, tried to tear it down, stoned Israeli soldiers on the Israeli side of the fence. The Israeli soldiers fired at them, and that causing the casualties among the Palestinian refugees on the Lebanese of the border.

So certainly the violence spreading across to that Lebanese- Israeli front in a very volatile situation. And a dramatic development in the West Bank too. Earlier today, before dawn, Israeli forces withdrew from a shrine, a Jewish shrine, inside the Palestinian-controlled town of Nablus on the West Bank, and this was a new development.

The Israelis had positioned an isolated Israeli position inside the Palestinian territory and would mark -- it does mark the first area which Israel has relinquished since the start of the violence some 10 days ago, and this ongoing fierce confrontation between the Israelis and Palestinians along -- in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Jerusalem, and in parts of northern Israel.

And now the Palestinians raised their flag after the Israeli troops withdrew from there. The Palestinian police had first taken over, but as time wore on, hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians swarmed into that isolated military outpost-turned-shrine, or shrine- turned-military outpost, and began tearing it down with pick-hammers and iron bars, and the Palestinian police seem to have lost control of that area, the Israelis condemning that, saying that the Palestinian Authority had said they would protect the shrine even after Israel had withdrawn.

So with clashes continuing on other fronts, this worrisome development in terms of a spread of the violence along the Lebanese- Israeli border, this should be another day, it seems, and when this confrontation goes on with no clear sign that it is in any way reducing the friction, as Israel had hoped to do by this pullout from the shrine in Nablus -- Linda.

STOUFFER: Jerrold Kessel with the latest on what's going on in the Mideast. Thank you very much.

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