§ ON 2i October 1999,a boy working in a factory producing cigarette lighters in the southern West Bank town of Hebron dropped a box of lighter fluid he was carrying to a second-storey workroom (Al-Ayyam, 23 October 1999).

A fire flared in the room where female factory workers assembled lighters for wages of less than US$i per hour. Most had been recently recruited from their villages in the Hebron district and worked without written contractual arrangements or accident or health insurance.

The scale of tragedy in Hebron mobilized the Palestinian public in demon­strations in a number of Palestinian cities; in Hebron itself, angry protestors attacked the Hebron municipality, considering the mayor in particular to have failed to oversee the factory’s working conditions or force prominent local business­men to adhere to health and safety regulations. It was perhaps the most widespread social and economic protest directed at government institutions in the Oslo period.

In the aftermath of this tragic event, bereaved families and local communities mobilized several legal systems and systems of rules to seek justice and compensa­tion, utilizing both the public channels of law and government and the processes of customary law. In the latter (and to some extent in the former), principles of diya (‘bloodwit’ or reparation) were invoked and contested, although not through the institutional processes of the shari'a courts, which retain jurisdiction over diya. Instead, both officials of the court and of the Authority were brought into the customary law process.