Israeli troops clamped a curfew on the West Bank village of Yatta, near Hebron, tonight after police were attacked there by stone-throwing youths. The police were sent to the village to investigate new complaints that Arab school girls were being poisoned.
More than 550 Arabs, mostly teen-aged girls, were hospitalized during the past week for symptoms attributed by Palestinian sources to poisonous substances introduced into their classrooms. Israeli health authorities who examined the sites and studied the symptoms stated flatly that there was no evidence that poison was the cause of the mysterious ailment.
Nevertheless, the Health Ministry announced last Thursday that it has asked the United States Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to send a team of experts to assess the Israeli findings and to confirm them. It is not yet known whether the Atlanta center has responded.
The Ministry stressed that the negative findings yielded by its investigation of alleged mass poisoning were indisputable. It made the request, however, to allay widespread suspicion, generated by Palestinian sources, that the teen-agers were victims of an Israeli plot.
MASS HYSTERIA SUGGESTED
According to Dr. Baruch Modan, director of the Health Ministry, the clinical symptoms — dizziness, fainting, headache and nausea — first reported in the West Bank town of Jenin and its vicinity, are unrelated to poisoning. He said at a press conference Thursday that this was determined by thorough tests in the area and in laboratories.
The chief army physician, Gen. Moshe Revah, who was present at the press conference, suggested that the illnesses were a psychosomatic manifestation of mass hysteria.
Revah noted that such phenomena was not uncommon among girls in the 14-17 year-old age bracket. He said scientific findings elsewhere in the world supported the conclusion that the symptoms were an hysterical reaction to an event, the initial cause of which is unclear. He said that two border policemen who complained of the same symptoms could also have been subject to mass hysteria.
Gen. Shlomo Illia, head of the Israeli civil administration on the West Bank, said at the press conference that local political elements had a clear interest in causing mass hysteria in Jenin prior to Land Day, March 30, when Palestinians demonstrate against the confiscation of Arab lands in Galilee by the Israeli authorities in 1976. Some Israeli officials claimed last week that if there had indeed been a poisoning, it was the work of Palestinian terrorists seeking to inflame the populace against Israel.
Modan said none of the cases are considered serious. Most of the teen-agers admitted to hospitals were released. But in Nablus, 15 of 50 girls released were readmitted with the same complaints.
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