The World - News from April 11, 1989

Israeli Military Chief of Staff Dan Shomron has forced a colonel to resign after investigations of the use of unnecessary violence by soldiers under his command, a military source said. 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 source said that Col. Yuhuda Meir, who was military governor of Nablus in the West Bank, decided to step down and leave the army after Shomron told him it was that or stand trial. Two incidents were investigated: in one, troops used a bulldozer to bury four Palestinians under piles of sand (they survived); in the other, two Palestinian teen-agers in Nablus were beaten, a scene filmed by an American TV crew.