Ailing Schoolgirls

Ya Allah! Ya Allah! [O Lord! O Lord!]" The cries were from a 15-year-old schoolgirl named Amel Sharif, a patient at Amira Alia Hospital in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Between her screams, Amel tried to explain what had happened to her four days earlier.

"I was in school and I smelled something," she said, "and then I felt something pressing on my chest." At that point she passed out and was taken to the hospital, along with 250 other schoolchildren from the area. Her ailment: a mysterious malady that in the past four weeks has afflicted as many as 900 West Bank Palestinians, the majority of them young women. It all started at a girls' school in the West Bank village of Arrabe when pupils began to complain of the same symptoms: headaches, abdominal pains, dizziness, energy loss. The ailment spread to eight schools in Jenin, a larger West Bank town a few miles away, and early last week it reached Hebron. What was going on? Baruch Modan, Director-General of the Israeli Ministry of Health, acknowledged that the first cases might have been caused by some "environmental irritant." Investigators had noted the presence of a yellow powder, possibly pollen, on some windowsills of one school near Jenin, and the air in the vicinity of the school was found to contain a trace of hydrogen sulfide. Doctors in Hebron observed slightly excessive amounts of calcium and sodium in the blood of some of their patients. Said one local doctor: "There is no sign of poisoning. Still, something has happened to these girls."

But what? Because the West Bank lies at the epicenter of Arab-Israeli tensions, both sides charged that the "epidemic" was politically based. Arab leaders maintained that Israeli authorities, or perhaps extremist Jewish settlers in the West Bank, had poisoned the schoolgirls, hoping to intimidate the Palestinians and eventually drive them out of the West Bank. Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, declared that it was all part of a "planned and systematic crime against our people." Israeli officials, stung by such accusations, charged that the Palestinians were exaggerating the seriousness of the illness for political effect. Later the Israelis claimed that a few of the girls had admitted they faked their symptoms. The World Health Organization, the International Red Cross and the U.S. accepted an Israeli invitation to send medical experts to make their own investigations, but the results of these studies have not yet been announced.

By last week many Israeli doctors were convinced that whatever the original "environmental irritant" might have been, the West Bank ailment had become what some described as a "mass phenomenon." A Palestinian health official agreed, concluding that while the first 20% of the cases were probably caused by the inhalation of some kind of gas, the remaining 80% were basically psychosomatic. As Director-General Modan put it, "We don't want to call it hysteria for fear we will create hysteria." A more fundamental problem is that even if the epidemic really was a case of mass hysteria, few Palestinian Arabs in the emotion-charged West Bank were likely to believe it.

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