Security Council condemns 'appalling' Hebron massacre.

• Position: UN body acts to protect Palestinians after the fatal attack on mosque worshippers in Hebron on the West Bank - Includes related article on work of UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East after Israel-PLO peace accord

Expressing shock over the "appalling massacre" of Palestinian worshippers in the Mosque of Ibrahim in the West Bank town of Hebron on 25 February during the holy month of Ramadan, the Security Council on 18 March called for measures to "guarantee the safety and protection of the Palestinian civilians throughout the occupied territory", including a "temporary international or foreign presence" within the context of the ongoing peace process.

In adopting resolution 904 (1994), the Council also strongly condemned "the massacre in Hebron and its aftermath which took the lives of more than 50 Palestinian civilians and injured several hundred others". It called upon Israel to continue to take measures, including confiscation of arms, with the aim of "preventing illegal acts of violence by Israeli settlers".

Implementation without delay of the Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Interim Self-Government Arrangements--signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on 13 September 1993 in Washington, D.C.--was also urged. The Council asked the United States and the Russian Federation--as co-sponsors of the peace process--to continue their efforts to invigorate it.

The resolution as a whole was adopted without a vote following a paragraph-by-paragraph vote, in which the United States abstained on two preambular paragraphs. Specifically, it opposed the description of the territories occupied during the 1967 war as "occupied Palestinian territory", and the particular reference to Jerusalem, the status of which was to be addressed at a later stage of the peace process.

M. Nasser Al-Kidwa, Observer for Palestine, said that every single Council resolution on the Palestinian issue had contained language referring to Jerusalem as part of the occupied territories. Any attempt to change that language carried the danger of a change in policy. Arab East Jerusalem was an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territory, he said. All Israeli measures aimed at changing Jerusalem's status were legally null and void, he declared.

Gad Yaacobi of Israel said his country shared the Council's support for implementation of the Declaration of Principles. However, reference to Jerusalem was incompatible with that Declaration, by which both parties agreed to address the issue not later than the beginning of the third year of the interim period. It called upon the Palestinians, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon to return to the peace talks.

|Despicable act'

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