Pogrom In Ramallah: Isn't Israeli 'Democracy' Wonderful?

Al Jazeera TV footage showed the bodies of five Palestinian men executed when Israeli soldiers found out where they'd hidden in a building in Ramallah on Sunday. They had feared for their lives and apparently had good reason to do so. Four were shot with a single bullet to the head. One was murdered with sixteen bullets, mostly fired into his face and chest. Their weapons were confiscated. They lay on the floor, mostly face down. Dark streaks of dried blood covered the walls of their room.

On Monday, an Al-Jazeera cameraman filmed the morgue of a Ramallah hospital so full of the dead that new bodies arriving had to be put in separate rooms where fans running with an electricity generator could keep them from decomposing too quickly. This is just Ramallah. It has been closed off to most of the outside world and its residents huddle inside their houses unable to replenish badly needed supplies. A repeat of the destruction of this once bustling West Bank city is taking place as I write: in Bethlehem, Tulkarem, and Qalqiliya. This is just the beginning.

Gazans are tired and their nerves are on edge. So far we are relatively untouched by Sharon's new "war" against Palestine and "the enemy of the world," Yassir Arafat, who continues to sit in a closet-like room without light, water, or communication with the outside. There is probably a secret microphone hidden in his kuffiyah from which he whispers his instructions to potential suicide bombers all over Palestine to wreak their destruction on the defenseless Israels each time another member of his security forces is murdered for existing.