Israeli Soldiers Shoot at Protesters on Syrian Border

 

Wave after wave of protesters, mainly Palestinians from refugee camps in Syria, approached the frontier with the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Israeli soldiers opened fire on those who crossed a new trench and tried to attack the border fence near the towns of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights and Quneitra in Syria.

By nightfall, the Syrian news agency SANA reported that 22 protesters had been killed and more than 350 had been wounded. Israeli officials said that they had no information on casualties but suggested that the Syrian figures were exaggerated.

Even so, it was the worst bloodshed in the Golan Heights since Israel and Syria fought a war there in 1973.

The protest, on the anniversary of the start of the 1967 Middle East war, followed a larger, coordinated assault by demonstrators three weeks ago on four fronts — Syria, Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank — and attempts on two others, Egypt and Jordan, that were thwarted by those governments.

This time, Lebanon and the Hamas government in Gaza kept protesters away from their borders, and the turnout was low in the West Bank.

The focus was on Syria, where thousands of protesters tried to force their way across the border. Syria’s decision to allow the protest appeared to reflect a calculated strategy to divert attention from its own antigovernment uprising.

Still, the protesters said they counted the day a success because they drew Israeli fire on unarmed demonstrators, generating outrage at Israel. At a time when the peace process is already strained, that reaction is likely to increase international pressure on Israel to create the conditions for resumed negotiations with the Palestinians, and to bolster support in the United Nations for the Palestinian appeal for statehood.

The young protesters, disillusioned with the stymied peace talks and continued Israeli settlement building, say they believe they have hit on a new tactic that at least achieves something, if at a cost, and they intend to repeat it.

“The plan is to clash with the soldiers now,” said Muhammad Abu al-Nassar, 25, who was protesting at a West Bank checkpoint. “We believe that unarmed popular resistance is the best form of ending the occupation.”

Israeli officials, who say they tried every nonlethal method of crowd control at their disposal before resorting to live fire, worry about being cast as the villain but admit they are in a bind.

“What would any country do if people from an enemy country were marching on its borders?” asked Dan Gillerman, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. “We tried all other possible means to stop them.”

At the weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would not allow “extremist elements” to penetrate Israel’s borders. “I have instructed the security forces to act with determination, with maximum restraint, but with determination to maintain our sovereignty, our borders, our communities and our citizens,” he said.

A military spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, said that Israeli forces warned the protesters not to approach the border, in Arabic with megaphones; used nonlethal riot dispersal means like tear gas, which failed to deter them; and then fired warning shots in the air.

When the demonstrators reached the fence, soldiers were “left with no choice,” she said, “but to open fire at the feet of the protesters.”

Syria’s role also creates a quandary for Israel. Although the countries technically remain in a state of war, Syria has kept the border quiet for 37 years.

Protesters there could not have approached the border without government acquiescence, and analysts said the decision to allow the protest was aimed at deflecting attention from the protests sweeping Syria against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“I would note that these protests were carried live on Syrian television” an Israeli official said. “They do not carry the protests against their own regime live. They made a decision to try to exploit this for their own purposes.”

The official spoke anonymously because, he said, Israel did not want to allow the protests to stoke tensions with Syria.

But even revived peace talks with the Palestinians would be unlikely to alter Mr. Assad’s calculations.

Rina Castelnuovo contributed reporting from Majdal Shams, Golan Heights, and Fares Akram from Gaza.

 

Syrians Are Fatally Shot At Funeral for Protesters

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian security forces fired at mourners in the central city of Homs during a funeral procession on Saturday for eight protesters who died the previous day, killing at least five people and wounding several others, witnesses and human rights activists said.

The fresh round of violence came as the death toll from Friday’s protests reached 44, according to the Syrian National Organization for Human Rights. More than half of the victims on Friday died in Idlib Province, where tanks had been deployed on Friday as part of the attempt to crush antigovernment protests by sending troops into restive towns and cities. The bloodshed on Saturday followed the pattern in recent weeks in Syria, in which killings on Fridays — the Muslim holy day, when some of the largest demonstrations of the Arab Spring have been held — have led to more protests and deaths.

One witness said the shooting began as mourners were chanting “Rest in peace, martyr, we will continue on the same path” as well as “The people want to topple the regime” and “Freedom, freedom.”

“A lot of people were injured. There was blood everywhere,” said the witness, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They were firing at us directly.”

Ammar Qurabi, who leads the Syrian human rights group, said he too had been told that the shooting began as the funeral turned into a protest. “The neighborhood is now under fire and completely surrounded,” he said.

Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has blamed the protests against his 11-year-old rule on armed Islamist groups. The government said Saturday that Islamist militants had killed 17 people, including civilians, police and security forces, in Idlib and Homs, the city that is emerging as a locus of the challenge to Mr. Assad’s authority, on Friday.

The Syrian state news agency, Sana, said the killings occurred after armed groups exploited specific instructions given to security forces “not to shoot, to preserve the lives of civilians.” The agency did not provide details on how the deaths occurred. Human rights activists said that nearly 900 people had been killed in the past nine weeks in the Syrian uprising and that 10,000 protesters and activists were in jail.

The United States has begun taking a harder stand against Mr. Assad. The Obama administration imposed sanctions on Mr. Assad last week, and the president used some of his strongest language yet to denounce the crackdown, saying Syria’s leader should lead a transition to democracy or “get out of the way.”

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Israel Clashes With Protesters on Four Borders

With an unprecedented wave of coordinated protests, the popular uprisings that have swept the region for the first time touched Israel directly. Like those other protests, plans for this one spread over social media, including Facebook, but there were also signs of official support in Lebanon and Syria, where analysts said leaders were using the Palestinian cause to deflect attention from internal problems.

At the Lebanese border, Israeli troops shot at hundreds of Palestinians trying to force their way across. The Lebanese military said 10 protesters were killed and more than 100 were wounded; Israel said it was investigating the casualties.

In the Golan Heights, about 100 Palestinians living in Syria breached a border fence and crowded into the village of Majdal Shams, waving Palestinian flags. Troops fired on the crowd, killing four of them.

In the West Bank, about 1,000?protesters carrying Palestinian flags and throwing stones and occasional firecrackers and molotov cocktails tangled with Israeli riot troops near the military checkpoint between Ramallah?and Israel. Scores were injured, local medical officials said.

In Gaza, when marchers crossed a security zone near the border, Israeli troops fired into the crowd, wounding dozens.

In Jordan and Egypt, protesters setting off for the border were thwarted by government security forces.

Every year in mid-May, many Palestinians mark what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe, the anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 and the war in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes through expulsion and flight.

But this was the first year that Palestinian refugees and their supporters in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, inspired by the recent protests around the Arab world, tried to breach Israel’s military border from all sides.

“The Palestinians are not less rebellious than other Arab peoples,” said Ali Baraka, a Hamas representative in Lebanon.

At day’s end, as a tense calm returned to the country’s borders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said the protests had been aimed at destroying Israel, not creating a Palestinian state alongside it.

“The leaders of these violent demonstrations, their struggle is not over the 1967 borders but over the very existence of Israel, which they describe as a catastrophe that must be resolved,” he said in a televised statement. “It is important that we look with open eyes at the reality and be aware of whom we are dealing with and what we are dealing with.”

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian authority, saluted the protesters in a televised speech, referring to the dead as martyrs. “The blood of the Nakba fatalities was not spilled in vain,” he said. “They died for the Palestinian people’s rights and freedom.”

Officials and analysts have argued that with peace talks broken down and plans for a request of the United Nations to declare Palestinian statehood in September, violence could return to define this conflict, which has been relatively quiet for the past two years.

“This is war,” said Amjad Abu Taha, a 16-year-old from Bethlehem who joined the protesters in Ramallah, a rock in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “We’re defending our country.”

Nearby, hundreds of Israeli troops roamed the area using stun guns and tear gas.

In Gaza, the Hamas police stopped buses carrying protesters near the main crossing into Israel, but dozens of demonstrators continued on foot, arriving at a point closer to the Israeli border than they had reached in years and drawing Israeli fire.

Later, in a separate incident, an 18-year-old Gazan near another part of the border fence was shot and killed by Israeli troops when, the Israeli military says, he was trying to plant an explosive.

Reporting was contributed by Nada Bakri and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Fares Akram from Gaza, Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan, and David D. Kirkpatrick and Liam Stack from Cairo.

 

Defying Crackdown, Syria Protesters Return to Streets in Stalemated Contest of Wills

 

Thousands of protesters defied a ferocious crackdown and returned to the streets on Friday, even in towns that the military had besieged only days before. But the protests seemed incapable of mustering a critical mass — as they did in Egypt and Tunisia — and, at least anecdotally, the number of demonstrators appeared to be smaller than in past weeks.

The government said it had subdued some of the most restive locales — namely Baniyas on the Mediterranean coast and Dara’a in the south — after deploying tanks and soldiers and arresting thousands. In the face of growing international condemnation and a reeling economy, though, it offered at least the facade of compromise, saying it would begin what it called a national dialogue next week.

Some dissidents in Damascus, Syria’s capital, described a deadlock in a conflict that has already shown the weakness of both the government and the opposition, dangerously exacerbated sectarian tensions in a country still struggling to forge a national identity and perhaps sown the seeds of an armed rebellion in rural regions knit by clan loyalties.

“We don’t know where we’re going,” said Louay Hussein, a prominent dissident who has met with a government adviser in a tentative dialogue that began last week. “We don’t know what’s next. If the crackdown is still in place by the end of next week, then we’re headed toward a disaster, and it will be almost impossible to overcome it.”

The death toll on Friday — six, according to human rights activists — paled before past weeks, a reflection of either government restraint or, more likely, the inability of protesters to cross red lines that the government has declared on successive Fridays. Demonstrators from the outskirts of Damascus did not try to march on the capital, a symbol of government prestige, nor were they able to gather in central locations in cities like Homs, Syria’s third largest and a center of the uprising.

“The main thing we wanted to show the world with the protest is that we haven’t stopped, that we’re not asleep and that we’ve broken the barrier of fear,” said Abu Haidar, a resident reached by phone who took part in the demonstration in Homs.

By all accounts, the protesters showed that. Even though they could not converge in the city’s center, demonstrators still gathered in five neighborhoods, despite a withering assault this week in which tanks shelled residential areas and black-clad security forces arrested so many people that they had to detain them in soccer fields. At least three people were reported killed before the protests ended in the late afternoon.

“We don’t like you! We don’t like you!” crowds chanted there, denouncing Mr. Assad in a fashion unheard of months ago. “You and your party, leave us!”

Residents fleeing to the Lebanese border spoke of clashes erupting in Homs and the hinterland this week, with men taking up arms to defend themselves.

Demonstrations were reported in at least eight towns and villages in the region around Dara’a, which is known as the Houran and is famous for its wheat and vineyards. That protests erupted even in towns like Hara, where tanks entered this week and several people were killed, suggested that the region, devastated by drought and populated by extended clans, was so restive as to be in revolt. One person was reported killed there.

Larger protests convened in towns and cities in eastern Syria, populated by ethnic Kurds. At least three small groups of protesters gathered in Damascus itself, but were quickly broken up by security forces that, in at least one locale, outnumbered marchers.

“People still have the will to demonstrate, but the security forces were prepared for us,” said one of the protesters in Damascus. “They were waiting.”

Katherine Zoepf contributed reporting from New York, and Hwaida Saad and employees of The New York Times from Beirut and Damascus, Syria.

 

Syria Broadens Deadly Crackdown on Protesters

The breadth of the assault — from the Mediterranean coast to the poor steppe of southern Syria — seemed to represent an important turn in an uprising that has posed the gravest challenge to the 11-year-long rule of President Bashar al-Assad. Though officials have continued to hint at reforms, and even gingerly reached out to some dissidents last week, the escalation of the crackdown seemed to signal the government’s intent to end the uprising by force.

Since the beginning of the uprising, Syria has barred most foreign journalists, and many news accounts have relied on human rights groups and networks of activists inside Syria. But in past days, those activists have complained that they have been almost entirely unable to speak with people in Homs and Baniyas, the most besieged places. Even satellite phones that protest organizers had smuggled across Syria were not working. “It seems that they’ve gotten better in tracking satellite mobile phones,” said Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group.

The reasons for the newfound ability to sever communications were unclear, but Obama administration officials have said Iran, which faced a similar uprising in 2009, has provided the Syrian government, a longtime ally, with coercive supplies like tear gas, along with communications equipment that might help interrupt activists’ phones.

“The only country they can trust to back them to the end is Iran,” said an analyst based in Syria who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The Syrian government’s actions against protesters, which have intensified since Friday, come at a time when the opposition remains unable to act collectively. Even as the United States and the European Union have imposed limited sanctions on government figures, though not Mr. Assad himself, many officials view the opposition as too weak to provide an alternative, a point that the Syrian government has relentlessly pressed. Its argument, either us or chaos, has found a certain resonance among minorities of Christians and heterodox Muslim sects there.

“We’re not focused on a transition right now,” an Obama administration official said in Washington. “We don’t know who we’d talk to and who we’d work with.”

At least 30 tanks were said to be in Baniyas, one of Syria’s most restive locales, which the military entered before dawn on Saturday. Activists and human rights groups complained of receiving almost no information from Baniyas, which has a population of 50,000 and is home to an oil refinery and a hydroelectric plant that serves the region, but one activist said at least 6 people had been killed and 250 people arrested since the operation began.

As in other towns, electricity and water were cut, at least temporarily.

Fighting was reported in Homs, Syria’s third largest city, which tanks entered Friday. Mr. Tarif said 14 people had been killed there; he could not confirm the casualties in Baniyas. Videos smuggled out of Homs, their authenticity undetermined, showed gunfire and crowds of people running for cover across a grassy lot. Mr. Tarif said the military also entered Tafas, in southern Syria.

“This is a campaign that’s going to more cities,” he said. “It’s escalating, and it’s very worrying because they’re also getting better at isolating these places.”

He said his group had documented 750 arrests, most of them in the Damascus suburbs, though he had no precise figures for Homs and Baniyas.

The uprising began in mid-March with protests in Dara’a, a town near Tafas and the border with Jordan. The protesters gathered after security forces arrested and mistreated high school students for scrawling antigovernment graffiti. The unrest soon spread, with successive Fridays in which thousands took to the streets in dozens of towns. The military’s presence in Tafas on Sunday suggests that the plight of Dara’a, part of a landscape knit tightly by extended clan loyalties, has roiled the region around it, a fertile but drought-stricken plateau famous for wheat and vineyards.

The military said it was withdrawing from Dara’a last week, and while armed columns were filmed departing, residents say the military remains in force. Townspeople were allowed to leave their homes Sunday from 8 a.m. to noon, activists said, and intermittent electricity and water were restored to some areas.

 

Protesters Demand President’s Ouster in Burkina Faso

A popular reggae tune, “Quitte le Pouvoir!” or “Give Up Power,” the jaunty anthem of African protesters, alternated with a variation of the slogan used in Tunisia four months before: “Blaise, give it up!” Some protesters held up signs comparing Mr. Compaoré, a former army captain who has been regularly re-elected with 80 percent of the vote, to the ousted Tunisian ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

Politicians from many of the country’s 34 opposition parties joined local pop music stars in a demonstration that lasted for hours under a blazing sun. They condemned Mr. Compaoré’s lengthy rule and accused him of corruption and patronage politics. Trucks of friendly soldiers waved to the protesters, many of them young people.

The demonstration came on the heels of two months of ferment among the usually quiet population, as students, soldiers, merchants and most recently the police have all taken to the streets to protest high prices, low wages and Mr. Compaoré’s undivided rule in a country that is ninth from the bottom on the United Nations’ Human Development Index.

A political crisis in neighboring Ivory Coast — which landlocked Burkina Faso depends on for food shipments — has forced up living costs, adding to the unrest.

The previous protests have been violent, with soldiers rampaging through the capital and provincial cities earlier in April, looting and burning offices of Mr. Compaoré’s ruling party, and even co-opting his elite presidential guard. The ruler, who seized power in a 1987 coup, has been shaken: he has dismissed his government, named a former journalist as his new prime minister and met with army officers — he did so on Friday — to promise better pay.

Those measures did not impress Saturday’s fist-waving crowd, assembled in a giant asphalt plaza. “Since Blaise Compaoré took power, by the method that you know” — and the crowd shouted “murder, murder!” — “there’s a tiny minority that has robbed and pillaged, while the majority has stagnated in misery,” said Tahirou Barry of the National Renaissance Party.

“The people are fed up! The soldiers are fed up! The students are fed up! The shopkeepers are fed up!” yelled Norbert Tiendrebeogo of the Social Forces Front. The crowd cheered a local rap star, S’Mockey, when he yelled: “The problem is, it’s not a democracy. It’s been tropicalized.”

Still, the heterogeneous nature of the protest’s organizers, including politicians from several dozen different parties, points to the central problem of the opposition, in the view of analysts: it is deeply divided after years of Mr. Compaoré’s rule.

“I’d be very surprised if the Compaoré regime collapses,” said Pierre Englebert, a political scientist at Pomona College and a Burkina Faso expert. “At the core of his regime, he’s repressive. But he handles things with a certain distance. You can be corrupted. He’ll let steam off.”

Among the opposition’s strongest cards are the unsolved killings of two popular men: Thomas Sankara, Mr. Compaoré’s predecessor and army comrade, who was killed during the 1987 coup that he helped lead; and Norbert Zongo, a crusading journalist who was killed in 1998 while he was looking into the Compaoré family’s finances. There were frequent references to the two men on Saturday.

The high price of rice was also a focus of complaints. “Life has just become too hard,” said Moussa Lingani, a printer. Rice, he said, was now over $40 a bag.

“I haven’t eaten in two days,” said Remy Kafando, a farmer. “To eat, it’s just hard. We want a complete change. We don’t want anymore of this. We’re ready for civil war.”

 

Syrian Forces Shoot at Protesters Trying to Break Siege

 

The bloodshed in the besieged town, Dara’a, was the worst episode on another violent Friday. At least 40 people were killed across the country, repeating a cycle that has become a fixture of the most serious challenge to the Assad family’s four decades of dictatorial rule. For weeks, demonstrators have poured into the streets after noon prayers, only to face the determination of the government to disperse them, often with live ammunition.

But the cries of grief in Dara’a and angry chants in dozens of towns and cities on Friday seemed to signal a new dynamic in the uprising. As much as calls for freedom and an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, the protest movement appeared to be feeding off its own symbols and legitimacy, as the demonstrators’ anger grows over the suffering inflicted on Dara’a and the deaths of more than 500 protesters — by activists’ count — since March.

“Stop the siege of Dara’a!” demonstrators shouted in Homs, Syria, near the Lebanese border.

“We cannot challenge the government,” said an opposition figure in Damascus who asked not to be identified. “They’re armed, and we’re unarmed. If they want to kill us, they can kill us. If they want to arrest us, they can arrest us. But no matter how much blood gets spilled and how violent it gets, this is our country, and we’re not giving it up.”

Friday was viewed as a test of sorts for both sides — whether the government might ease its crackdown after killing 112 protesters a week earlier, and whether demonstrators would defy blunt warnings and the threat of more force by returning to the streets. In the end, neither budged, and organizers seemed buoyed by the turnout.

“I’m amazed,” Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group, said early in the day. “People are in the streets. I can’t believe it.

“The government is going to have to reconsider their strategy,” he added.

So far, there are few signs of it doing so, despite international condemnation, American moves to place sanctions on Syrian officials and a European effort to impose an arms embargo.

In the uprising’s early weeks, the government tried to stanch the unrest with a mix of mostly hollow concessions and force. Since last week, it has emphasized the latter, an indication underscored by the shootings on Friday.

Some cracks have emerged in its facade, with reports this week of desertions from the military in Dara’a and even fighting among troops, along with the resignations of nearly 300 low-level members of the Baath Party, which has ruled in some fashion since 1963.

Though the government has vast resources to draw on — and bastions of support, particularly among religious minorities — it faces an evolving revolt that it has proven unable to crush and that may be widening.

“There really isn’t a coalesced movement yet or official organizers of the protests,” an Obama administration official said. “It’s almost an organic thing. The more violence happens, the more the cycle continues, the more people hit the street.”

Residents and activists painted a wrenching portrait of the scene in Dara’a, a poor town in southern Syria near the Jordanian border where protests last month helped galvanize nationwide demonstrations.

The military had stormed the town on Monday, effectively occupying it, but the ensuing hardships — shortages of food, water and even baby formula, in addition to dozens of reported deaths — have become a rallying cry of the revolt, unleashing solidarity protests in other towns and neighboring countries.

Inside the town, residents said people were too afraid to go into the streets, or even to attend Friday Prayer. Instead, they shouted “God is great!” from within their homes, the chants growing louder as residents in building after building took up the cry.

As they did, residents said, soldiers fired into the air.

“We are living in complete isolation,” a resident said.

 

Bahrain Sentences 4 Protesters to Death

 

Three other activists who were also on trial in the same case received sentences of life in prison.

Human rights activists in Bahrain voiced fears that the verdicts could generate a new wave of protests in the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom. They also argued that the trial was rendered unfair by a series of legal abuses, including the arrest of one of the defendants’ lawyers, Mohammed al-Tajer, one of Bahrain’s most prominent attorneys. The suspects were also barred from meeting with their families, and the news media were not allowed to cover the trial.

“These verdicts will have a huge negative impact on the Bahraini society,” said Mohamed Maskati, who heads a human rights group in the kingdom. “We fear brutal violence in the days ahead. I am not optimistic at all — especially that there could be more similar verdicts in the near future.”

Other activists refused to talk, citing the wave of arrests that has swept the country in the past two months.

Amnesty International urged Bahrain to not carry out the verdict.

“They must uphold the right to fair trial and they must not use the death penalty under any circumstances,” it said in a statement issued Thursday.

Bahraini authorities said that the defendants had the right to appeal, though Amnesty International and local human rights groups said that the appeal would be insignificant at this point.

“The defendants received all legal rights in line with human rights international laws,” the Bahraini government said in a statement issued Thursday. “The verdict is a clear indication of the community’s utter condemnation of barbarous crimes and a profound commitment to the protection of precious lives.”

Bahrain’s Shiite majority, which has long complained of marginalization by the Sunni ruling elite, took to the streets last month in mass protests and sit-ins demanding reforms, freedoms and equal rights. The king declared martial law and sought the help of Saudi troops to crack down on protests and crush dissent.

At least 30 people were reported killed since the protests started in March, among them four in custody. Human rights activists said they died after they were severely tortured. Bahraini authorities have acknowledged the deaths but have not explained them.

The demonstrations in Bahrain were inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, in which both countries’ presidents stepped down under great popular pressure after only a few weeks.

The seven opposition figures in Bahrain were charged in the premeditated murder of government employees. Military prosecutors presented a video that suggested that the protesters had run the policemen over with a car. Lawyers for the accused denied the charges.

 

Yemen Police and Protesters Clash as Deal Is Sought to End Political Crisis

The violence came as the Gulf Cooperation Council, a six-nation regional group, sought to broker an end to the political crisis. Yemen’s Saba news agency said government officials were meeting with the council in Abu Dhabi after similar meetings with opposition representatives on Sunday.

Gunfire erupted in the capital on Tuesday as government supporters threw rocks and beat protesters with sticks while security forces used tear gas and a water cannon to push back a march in the center of the city. “First they used the water cannon on us, then tear gas, then as we were running away they shot at us,” said Talal al-Azany, a protester who works with a local human rights organization.

One protester died of a gunshot wound to the head, and doctors said 10 others were wounded; it was unclear whether security forces or plainclothesmen had opened fire. A witness said a protester threw a gasoline bomb at the water cannon.

At a mosque turned medical clinic inside the demonstration area in Sana, about 100 men lay on the floor, some wounded, some beaten, some suffering from tear gas. “You see how our government works,” said Dahan Ali, an older protester using crutches after being shot in the leg during a clash on Sunday

Canisters of the tear gas used against protesters in Yemen show expiration dates as many as 10 years past. Many protesters have severe reactions to the gas, including seizures and foaming at the mouth. Yemeni doctors believe that these reactions prove that the gas has some sort of nerve agent in it, though the leftover canisters bear labels saying CN gas and CS gas, used for crowd control.

On Sunday night, one man had to be held down to the floor by four others as his body spasmed. “The victims convulse in ways that is not normal for tear gas,” said a doctor at the makeshift clinic, Tarek Noman. He said he treated exposure with Pralidoxime, a medicine used to counter nerve gas and phosphorus pesticides.

In Taiz, the violence broke out as demonstrators tried to march along a central street and were confronted by security forces, who began shooting after protesters began to burn barricades in the street, Reuters reported. Taiz is home to the country’s longest sit-in, with protesters claiming a central area since mid-February and demanding the departure of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

A video posted online Tuesday showed a member of the security forces firing from a moving car in Taiz, though it was unclear when the video was taken. Protesters there have said that both security forces and plainclothes government supporters have repeatedly shot at them over the last two weeks.

According to a plan backed by Western nations, Mr. Saleh would hand over presidential powers to his vice president and then leave office a month later under a guarantee of immunity from prosecution for himself and his family. Presidential elections would be held after 60 days, in accordance with the country’s Constitution. The plan is seen as a compromise between what the ruling party and the opposition have been seeking.

Yemen’s opposition coalition, known as the Joint Meetings Parties, has indicated its support for the plan; Mr. Saleh has yet to respond.

A high-ranking Yemeni official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said Mr. Saleh was seeking a guarantee that leading figures from the opposition, notably Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar, would leave Yemen for a set period of time if Mr. Saleh agreed to step down. The official described such an arrangement as a tribal method of settling scores and meant to ensure that the president saved face.

Youth protesters are planning marches for Wednesday in cities throughout the country in memory of the first protester killed in this uprising, Mohammed al-Alwani, who died Feb. 16 in the southern port city Aden.

The United Nations Security Council was scheduled to meet on Tuesday over the worsening political situation in Yemen, a country riven by tribal conflict in the north and a separatist movement in the south that has become a haven for Al Qaeda. Counterterrorism officials say the unrest has allowed the terrorist group to operate more freely and plot attacks against Western targets.

Laura Kasinof reported from Sana, and J. David Goodman from New York.

 

Security Forces Fire on Protesters in Restive Syrian City

The crowd had gathered to protest a deadly crackdown by the security forces, who activists say killed 14 demonstrators on Sunday. Tensions mounted throughout the day, and at about 2:10 a.m. on Tuesday the forces began firing again, witnesses said.

Shortly before 3 a.m., a woman who lives near the square said by cellphone: “Shooting is heard echoing through the city. The mosques are all calling for help. We fear that many are killed in the square, that it’s a massacre.” By early afternoon on Tuesday, The Associated Press reported, people were staying inside their homes and the streets were largely deserted.

Razan Zeitouneh, an activist with the Syrian Human Rights Information Link in Damascus, said she heard shots over the phone while talking to a distraught friend in the square. He told her that he saw four people killed and dozens injured.

The renewed protests amounted to a rejection of concessions outlined by President Bashar al-Assad in a televised address Saturday, notably lifting the country’s 48-year-old state of emergency by the end of this week.

At the funeral processions in Homs on Monday, mourners in New Clock Tower Square at first offered traditional prayers for the dead. But then protesters began clapping and chanting against Mr. Assad as funeral marchers lofted coffins overhead.

Security forces fired in the air in the afternoon, witnesses said by telephone, but the crowds refused to disperse. At 7:45 p.m. a protester reported that security forces had begun surrounding the square as the crowd chanted, “A sit-in, a sit-in until the overthrow of the regime!”

The activists were calling the square “Tahrir” — the Arabic word for liberation and the name of the square in Cairo where mass protests toppled President Hosni Mubarak in February.

“They want to create a Tahrir-like moment, a watershed event,” said Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian opposition leader based in Maryland who is in touch with some of the young activists.

Another human rights activist, Rassem al-Atassy, said by telephone from Homs during the day, “The people are in charge in the city center now.”

Ahmad, 28, a university student at the Homs protest, said: “We people of Homs are calling for three days’ general strike to show our rejection of the cold-blooded killing of peaceful protesters. Homs is boiling and no one can tell you what will happen in the near future.”

Mr. Abdulhamid said the activists in the square were unarmed, but had organized themselves to sleep in shifts, anticipating an overnight confrontation.

Late Monday night, the state news agency, SANA, reported that the Interior Ministry was calling the unrest “an armed mutiny” led by radical Salafi Muslims.

“The ministry added that these armed groups have committed vicious crimes that the law would punish with the strongest penalties,” SANA said. “Those groups aim to create chaos and terrify the Syrian people, exploiting the reform and freedom process launched within a comprehensive program according to specific timetables announced by President Bashar al-Assad.”

Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian human rights activist who is a visiting scholar at George Washington University, said the ministry’s statement suggested that Syria’s government was planning a showdown with protesters.

“I’m very concerned about the statement,” Mr. Ziadeh said. “This is a justification for what they intend to do in next few hours. This is the green light for armed confrontation.

“I’ve just talked to five or six protesters in Homs, and there are lots of women and children in the square, families, the women making sandwiches. From the minarets they were calling for more to join the demonstration. They estimated there were 50,000 by now.

“But all the communication has been cut now. I lost them.”

Ms. Zeitouneh, of the Syrian Human Rights Information Link, said as many as 20 people might have died in Homs on Sunday. Security forces opened fire on a crowd of protesters with live ammunition and tear gas, said another witness reached by phone.

State media reported that an army officer, Brig. Gen. Khodir al-Tilawi, two of his sons, and a nephew were ambushed, shot to death and brutally mutilated by “armed criminal groups.”

Ms. Zeitouneh also said she had received reports from the coastal town of Latakia that security forces had opened fire Sunday night on protesters there as well. The number of casualties was not immediately known.

Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group, said that five died in Latakia.

Human rights activists said on Monday that forces in both Homs and Latakia were arresting wounded protesters inside local hospitals, leading a doctor in Homs to say that as many as a dozen patients in critical condition might have died in detention.

The Syrian protests coincided with new disclosures that in 2005 the United States began to secretly finance some Syrian opposition groups intent on toppling Mr. Assad. The disclosures, in diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, showed State Department funding for Barada TV, an anti-Assad satellite broadcaster run by Syrian exiles in London, as well as concern by American diplomats in Syria that Syrian intelligence agents began to suspect the financing two years ago.

Liam Stack reported from Cairo, and Katherine Zoepf from New York. An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Damascus, Syria, Scott Shane from Washington, and J. David Goodman from New York.