(Gaza City, 27 April 2002) -- I heard the shooting from the balcony of my apartment. Ismail, Yusuf, and Anwar tried to infiltrate the Netzarim settlement in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday night. They may have carried knives with them. That's what Abdul Aziz Rantissi said, a leader of Hamas in Gaza. They weren't suicide bombers as the New York Times claimed; they were kids in the 9th grade doing something they hadn't carefully thought through.
It was stupid and it was a total waste of their young lives, which is why Hamas issued a statement calling on children not to act as martyrs for Palestine until they were ready; until they were old enough. There were three funerals in Gaza Thursday morning, April 24th, and the fathers of each of the boys spoke about their sons to my friend Robert and me. The fathers didn't even know the three boys were friends and each of the funerals took place separately in different parts of the city, the families unknown to each other; the grief equally palpable in each location.
Saturday, April 27, 2002
The real aim of "Operation Defensive Shield" was not to "destroy the infrastructure of terrorism".
This was merely a good slogan for uniting the people of Israel, who are angry and afraid after the suicide bombings. It is also a good political device, allowing Sharon to ride on the bandwagon of President Busch’s "war against international terrorism". Under the umbrella of "destroying the infrastructure of terrorism" one can do practically anything.
If Sharon had really intended to "destroy the infrastructure of terrorism", he would have acted very differently. He would have given the Palestinian masses hope of achieving their national freedom in the near future. He would have fortified the position of Yasser Arafat, the only effective partner for peace. He would have strengthened the Palestinian security forces and radically improved economic conditions in the Palestinian territories.
But destroying the infrastructure of terrorism is not Ariel Sharon’s aim. His program is far more radical: to break the backbone of the Palestinian people, crush their governmental institutions, turn the people into human wreckage that can be dealt with as he wishes. This may entail shutting them up in several enclaves or even driving them out of the country altogether.
As Sharon sees it, this would be finishing off the job started in 1948: to establish the real Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river; a state inhabited solely by Jews. It was no accident that he openly supported Slobodan Milosevic, the inventor of "ethnic cleansing".
Abstract: Aerial photographs were posted on the Israel Defenses Forces web site as evidence that the destruction in the Jenin refugee camp was on a small scale, incompatible with claims that there was a massacre. However, measurement of the area of destruction shown in the same photographs, compared with the population density of the camp, actually lends credibility to claims by Palestinians (and many international observers) that hundreds of people were killed.
Israel will not block the UN fact-finding commission on Jenin and will not ask to disqualify any of the appointed members, but will insist that anyone who testifies to the commission should be granted immunity from criminal prosecution on the basis of its findings, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday.
If such immunity is not granted, Peres said, Israel will not permit any Israeli to testify. Peres also asked that the committee's report be given to the sides for comment before it is submitted to Annan, and urged that experts in counter-terrorism and urban warfare be added to the panel. Annan replied that Peres' requests seemed reasonable.
Annan also met a legal delegation from Jerusalem yesterday at UN headquarters in New York. It was not clear last night whether the discussions, which began late, would end yesterday or continue today.
The delegation presented three main demands. The UN mission should concentrate only on Jenin; military and counter-terrorism experts should be added to look into the organizations that used the camp as a base for suicide bombings; and the report should present facts but no conclusions.
Annan partially acceded to the first two demands, and two more military advisers were added to the group yesterday. "It was decided that General [William] Nash will be assisted by two military staff officers and more experts will be brought on board as needed," UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said.
JERUSALEM A day after President George W. Bush declared that Israel should be "finished" with its military operations in Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank, Israeli troops swept through the West Bank city of Qalqilya on Friday and Israeli snipers shot and wounded two Palestinians inside the besieged Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
After the Israeli action, Bush repeated his insistence that the Israelis withdraw. "It's time to end this," he said from his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Backed by armored vehicles, the Israeli infantry moved into Qalqilya late Thursday night. By late Friday, they had arrested 16 Palestinians, confiscated explosives and killed the local head of an armed Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in a shoot-out, an Israeli Army spokeswoman said.
In addition, 26 Palestinians were arrested in villages near Qalqilya.
It was 4am when the Mirkava tank stopped outside our house. It sounded like an earthquake. The time has come, I said to myself; they will storm into the house any minute. Should I get out of bed, put on my clothes and try to save my dears, or wait till they bang on the door? I didn't want to be hunted in my pyjamas and unshaved. But I was afraid that if I got up and put on my clothes I would scare the children, who were sleeping next door with their mother, Salma - since the invasion they have been unable to sleep by themselves.
How are Americans to understand President Bush's kowtowing to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon?
Told to withdraw Israeli forces from the West Bank "without delay," Sharon refused. As Israel reduced the Jenin refugee camp to rubble using U.S.-supplied arms, Bush praised him as a "man of peace." The man of peace now wants to dictate the composition of a U.N. fact-finding mission, approved with U.S. support, into Jenin.
As former President Carter pointed out Sunday, presidents don't just spin their wheels. Presidents have power levers. In the case of Israel, said Carter, the levers are two: We provide $10 million per day in aid to Israel; we supply Israel weapons for defensive purposes only, not for attacks on refugees.
Bush is having a rocky time. He rides high approval ratings because of Sept. 11, but faced with the complexity of Middle East politics, he is at sea. A man of domestic politics, he founders in the world arena, where America has the reputation of being a superpower.
Bush's instinct from the beginning was to pull back from world affairs. Just as he would be the anti-Clinton, he would be the anti-Bush I. Those two presidents were too involved in the world, too busy with alliances, agencies, treaties and all those things that tie a good Texan down.
Late last week, senior Israeli Army officers called for uprooting several dozen isolated Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip because of the military burden involved in protecting them. Even though the proposal was focused on Israeli security interests, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon angrily dismissed it at a cabinet meeting, saying that as long as he was in power there would be no discussion of removing a single settlement.
It is hard to imagine a more dispiriting statement for those hoping for a negotiated land-for-peace end to hostilities in the Middle East. If Mr. Sharon sticks to this view he will leave little hope for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. We recognize that this is an exceptionally painful moment in a region where the focus has been on death and human suffering rather than on land. But ultimately this dispute is over land.
Being in love can be wonderful, but it does tend to make one overlook the faults of one's beloved. The perils of infatuation couldn't be clearer than in the case of a couple of articles appearing recently on WorldNetDaily, Joseph Farah's "Why Israel Must Prevail" and Ilana Mercer's "Liar, Liar, abaya on fire." (No, I didn't make up the column title to embarrass her or anything – I guess love makes a title like that seem "cute.")
"The camp's inhabitants are refusing help provided by the US because of its foreign policy concerning the Palestinian question and because the camp was destroyed by US-made weapons," Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) member for Jenin, Jamal al-Shaati, said.
The aid was sent by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), whose trucks bore its emblem as well as the US flag.
A large crowd of camp's residents, including representatives of all political factions there, threw the goods back into the trucks after they had been unloaded at the camp's entrance, Shaati said. The trucks were then forced to leave.
JERUSALEM, April 25 -- It was the second day of the battle for the Jenin refugee camp, and things were going badly for the Israelis. Palestinian gunmen, firing from sandbags hidden behind curtained windows, had pinned down advancing Israeli troops on the camp's western edge. Two Israelis had already died.
To a young Israeli army sergeant watching from a nearby rise known as Antennae Hill, perhaps 400 yards above the camp, it was clear that his commanders had been wrong when they had confidently predicted a few days earlier that the Palestinians would surrender at the first sight of approaching tanks.
That's when he heard the orders to open fire.
"The orders were to shoot at each house," recalled the sergeant, a member of a heavy weapons company in the Yoav regiment of the army's Fifth Brigade, a reserve unit that did the bulk of the fighting in Jenin. "The words on the radio were to 'Put a bullet in each window.' "
The sergeant, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was troubled by the orders, which did not require soldiers to actually see the gunmen they were trying to kill. But he said the Israeli soldiers didn't hesitate. They pounded a group of cinder-block homes -- the apparent source of Palestinian sniper fire -- with .50-caliber machine guns, M-24 sniper rifles, Barrett sniper rifles and Mod3 grenade launchers.
They are coming. That's what most Gazans tell you. The Israelis are coming. But the sand barricades are pathetic. Even a mile from the Erez "safe crossing'' point constructed during the early days of the mad dream of Oslo, the best that Yasser Arafat's legions can do is erect a 15ft rampart of earth and sandbags, with a 12ft gap for local cars – and for Israeli Merkava tanks when Ariel Sharon decides to drive in.
But the cops go on waving the donkey carts past the traffic lights, and the Palestinian Authority guards slumber with their Kalashnikov rifles in their tin shack, ready for part two of the Sharon War on Terror.
The odd thing is that if the Israeli Prime Minister really wants to dismantle the "network of terror'' of which he speaks so frequently, Gaza – the one place the Israeli army has not yet dared to reoccupy – should perhaps have been his first target. For here are militias aplenty, Palestinians who know how to destroy Merkava-3 tanks, who can manufacture short-range rockets and mortars and know the principles of booby traps better than the refugee gunmen of Jenin. As one local put it yesterday: "This place is wired.''
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on 21 April that the current stage of his Operation Defensive Shield had ended, but the campaign to root out "terrorist infrastructure" from the Palestinian territories would continue.
The past few days have given a clue to what the next stage will be like - a return to targeted killings (aka assassinations) of Palestinian militants and lightning raids on their suspected hideouts.
The US and Saudi Arabia are under pressure to reconsider their relationship, writes Gay Alcorn in Washington.
The most devious and telling part of the Saudi Plan has been to have two meetings -- both before and after meeting with the current President -- with former President George H.W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara Bush. On Wednesday, the Saudi Ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar, flew to Texas specifically to lunch with the Bushes. Today, the Crown Prince is taking a private train trip to the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, to again meet with Bush I.
What on earth is going on in Texas?
The Saudis have figured out what few in our nation want to admit: Bush the Father is secretly running his son's foreign policy.
Thursday, April 25, 2002
A friend of mine once told a college class that nobody ever woke up in 476 A.D. (the date historians define as the fall of the Roman Empire) and said, "Gosh, I'm in the Dark Ages."
His point is plain enough. Transitions happen gradually, and the people who live through them never realize what is happening. So it is with Americans. We are living in the ruins of a once-great republic. Now an empire utterly devoid of moral authority, the United States has nothing left but its military power and its capacity to consume on credit.
Where the world's great leaders will come from in the future, I don't know, but they will not be Americans. Look at the Republican and Democratic parties and their top leaders. Mediocrity in full bloom. Weak men with ambition but no principles. They are devious men, skilled at concealing their personal ambition in patriotic or compassionate rhetoric, depending on which constituency they are trying to bamboozle at the moment.
NEW YORK: U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan says he will not negotiate with Israel on the makeup of the U.N. fact-finding team he named to investigate what happened at the Jenin refugee camp.
Reports, evidence and eyewitnesses indicate that the Israeli forces massacred civilians - a charge Israel has repeatedly denied.
Israel says the team was set up with the goal of finding Israel at fault, and it is demanding changes in the team's leadership. The team's departure for the region has been delayed while Israeli envoys go to U.N. headquarters in New York to explain their objections. The Israeli delegation is due there on Thursday.
But U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard says Mr. Annan will not be meeting with the Israelis. He says Israel had indicated it would cooperate with whatever team Mr. Annan named, and that the secretary-general feels it members were his to choose. He says Mr. Annan expects the fact-finding team to be in place by Saturday.
A Jewish minister in the South African government threw his weight behind pressure for sanctions against Israel on Tuesday and said in an interview he would take the call to the cabinet soon.
Water Affairs and Forestry Minister Ronnie Kasrils, a former African National Congress (ANC) guerrilla, joined a small street protest in Cape Town by Jews and Muslims opposed to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
"I am Jewish born. Since Israel purports to speak and act in the name of Jews everywhere ... we are saying: No, not in my name. Never," he told Reuters in an interview later.
Kasrils and Cape Town Jewish businessman Max Ozinsky launched a petition last year distancing themselves from the actions of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his government. Kasrils yesterday said the time had come for him to back calls for a boycott of Israeli goods and the isolation of its government.
"People are saying that there should be boycotts, there should be sanctions ... I support the call now for the isolation and the boycott of Israel. I support sanctions," he said. "That is actually in the interests of all the people - Muslims, Jews and Christians - in the Middle East because the sooner we can stop this conflict ... the sooner we can get to negotiations, to a settlement for peace and a recognition of the Palestinian people's national rights."
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has protested to the Israeli military authorities after they prevented a
UN convoy of urgently-needed humanitarian aid from leaving Nablus today that was destined for the West Bank city of Qalqilya. The relief convoy, which contained flour, sugar, rice and lentils was to aid the many Palestinian refugees left homeless or needy by the recent Israeli incursions and curfews.
Mr Peter Hansen, UNRWA's Commissioner General, visited Nablus today following the lifting of the Israeli military curfew on the town. Mr Hansen witnessed the extensive destruction done to the Old City, or Nablus Casbah, and talked with residents who described to him what they had endured during the intensive fighting there in the first week of April.
AS ISRAELI tanks rolled out of three Palestinian cities on April 21st, a bluff Ariel Sharon commended the “great accomplishments” achieved by his army’s three-week reconquest of the West Bank. It was, and is, a necessary exercise to root out terrorists, says the Israeli government, and the greatest care was taken to protect civilian life. Others saw it differently.
In the razed heart of Jenin refugee camp, where the fighting was most bitter, Palestinians were shovelling out their decomposed dead. Elsewhere in the West Bank, 600,000 people stepped gingerly out after weeks of curfew to survey the debris of their cities: what they saw, they are convinced, was the calculated destruction of their lives, property and institutions.
“Sharon bombed us back seven years,” said mayor of Ramallah, Ayoub Rabah, amid the wreckage of his town hall, “and then some”. The immediate crisis is humanitarian. A week or so after the army finally allowed medics into Jenin camp, 50 corpses had been retrieved from the rubble, although the Palestinians still say that many more remain buried (though not the “up to 500” that was generally reported at first), mixed with sewage from cracked mains. The danger of epidemic is real. Some 4,000 of the camp’s 13,000 refugees are homeless. Everywhere there are primitive pipe-bombs, still unexploded.
Things are not much better elsewhere in the West Bank. UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for the welfare of Palestinian refugees, is distributing emergency rations to 90,000 Palestinians, but is hindered by the Israeli army’s sieges. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) gives warning of severe water, food and medicine shortages, especially acute in Palestinian villages cut off from their urban centers by dirt walls, army checkpoints and trigger-happy soldiers.
The humanitarian disaster is compounded by an economy that has plunged from depression to paralysis. The UN’s economists estimate that three-quarters of all production in the West Bank has come to a halt, and that three-quarters of the workforce is temporarily or permanently unemployed. Few have cash, and their savings are exhausted.
Israel's delays and objections to the UN panel of investigation into Jenin are looking more and more like an attempt to emasculate the entire exercise. If this is so, then it will only add to the impression that the country has something to hide. What happened in Jenin was bad enough, as our report in the Review section suggests, without Jerusalem playing games with the international community.
One should also question the wisdom of Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, in bowing to this pressure, delaying the visit of the panel and, worse, considering changing its personnel to accommodate Sharon's demands for more military members.
Establishing the facts of Jenin, in so far as this is possible, is of crucial importance. The Palestinians feel that a massacre was committed by Israeli soldiers in the refugee camp. The Israelis declare that what happened was no more than heavy fighting in which most of the casualties were Palestinian gunmen. Unless there is objective investigation, Jenin will enter the world of corrosive myth, in a region already overburdened with mythology.
Nor are Israeli objections to the make-up of the panel of any substance. Of course, an inquiry such as this needs to take into account the views of military men who understand the fine line between heavy-handed counter-insurgency and indiscriminate firing at civilians. But to suggest that figures such as Sadako Ogata, the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and Cornelio Sommaruga, of the Red Cross, are too sympathetic to the plight of civilians underlines the weakness of the Israeli case.
Saudi leaders are holding an informal summit with US President George W Bush at which they are expected to ask the US to do more to restrain Israel.
Mr Bush will be told that Israel's actions against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza must not be viewed as part of America's war against terror, according to Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Sa'ud al-Faysal.
He said there could be no discussion of the Middle East peace plan devised by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah until Israel had withdrawn fully from Palestinian areas
Prince Sa'ud said there was "no good terrorism" but Arabs could understand the acts of suicide bombers.
"There is a difference between a terrorist act such as 11 September and a suicide operation carried out by a young woman or man for whom all avenues to a dignified life have been blocked," he said.
He also dismissed Israel's attempts to compare its "fight against terrorism" to that waged by the US in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington.
"I can't believe that the United States accepts such a contention, and Crown Prince Abdullah will emphasise this," he said.
HOUSTON Crown Prince Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia was expected to tell President George W. Bush in stark terms Thursday that the strategic relationship between their two countries would be threatened if Bush did not moderate his support for Israel's military policies, according to a person familiar with the Saudi's thinking.
The prince and Bush were meeting at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas. In a bleak assessment, this person said the consequences of such a rupture could ripple through oil markets and galvanize the Arab world to take similar actions in what would be a "strategic debacle for the United States."
He added that there was talk within the Saudi royal family and in Arab capitals of using the "oil weapon" against the United States and of demanding that the United States leave strategic military bases and storage facilities in the region. He also warned of a general drift by Arab leaders toward the radical politics that have been building in the Arab street. The Saudi message contained an undeniable level of brinkmanship intended to put pressure on Bush to take a much larger political gamble by imposing a U.S.-brokered peace settlement on Israelis and Palestinians. But the Saudi delegation also brought a strong sense of the alarm and crisis that have been heard in Riyadh and other Arab capitals in advance of the summit talks.
"It is a mistake to think that our people will not do what is necessary to survive," the person close to the crown prince said, "and if that means we move to the right of bin Laden, so be it; to the left of Gadhafi, so be it; or fly to Baghdad and embrace Saddam like a brother, so be it.
"It's damned lonely in our part of the world, and we can no longer defend our relationship to our people."
The Palestinians are seeking more than $1bn in emergency and other aid at a meeting of international donors in Norway on Thursday.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Jan Petersen said experts would map out emergency needs for the Palestinians in the wake of the onslaught by the Israeli army.
They would also reassert support for the embattled Palestinian Authority.
However the Palestinians say there have been no guarantees from Israel it would not destroy again any infrastructure that was rebuilt.
Representatives from 21 countries are attending the one-day talks in Oslo including the US, Russia and the European Union.
WASHINGTON, 24 April — “There are only two countries supporting Israel right now: Israel and America,” an American Israel Public Affairs Committee member, Irv Shapiro told journalists yesterday. AIPAC is holding its annual conference in Washington, and, for the first time ever, thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the 3-day conference to protest Israel’s brutal reoccupation of the Palestinian territories.
It appears, however, that Shapiro should have been specific. According to recent polls, the US public is voicing doubts about America’s role in the Mideast, and US support of Israel.
Seventy-one percent of Americans tell a new Gallup Poll that the US government should not take either side in the Middle East conflict and 60 percent want to cut aid to Israel unless its invasion into Palestinian lands ends immediately.
One-quarter of Americans in a new Time/CNN poll said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is an enemy of the United States; 20 percent say he is a terrorist; and 65 percent say he cannot be trusted.
Forty-one percent said Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories are “mostly unjustified.”
And Americans strongly oppose — 71 percent to 20 percent — sending US troops to help end the conflict, because 81 percent fear US troops will be drawn into the fighting.
Two facts are clear: that Israelis have needlessly killed many Palestinians civilians in their recent incursion into the West Bank and that the United States has greatly assisted in those killings. The first fact is obvious. The second fact is nearly as obvious, since it stems both from the billions of dollars the U.S. supplies Israel each year and Israel’s use of Apache helicopters, F-16’s, and American made products such as Caterpillar bulldozers.
The question is: what is the responsibility of American citizens in all of this? I’m not talking about the U.S. government, which is clearly culpable, but regular citizens, folks who just go to work, raise their families, and, of course, pay taxes.
Let me start with an analogy. You’re walking along the beach and you see a child drowning in some shallow waves. You know how to swim. The water isn’t very turbulent. Are you morally responsible if you keep walking? Of course you are. You could have saved the child at no risk to yourself, but you chose not to. If the child dies, you should feel responsible for it.
Have I drawn a proper analogy? In some ways I have. Palestinian civilians are no more able to resist their killing than the child could resist the waves. And Americans, through our taxes, are helping to stir the water.
Dear Friends,
Would that i had my copy of Faustus here, to provide the exact quote that has been in my mind since i first stepped into the horror of anti-humanity that is now Jenin Camp, the exchange in which Mephistopholes points out to Faustus that hell already exists here on earth. After what i have witnessed there, i am beyond quotes, beyond words, almost but not quite beyond tears, which flowed last night even in my sleep. The Israelis conducted a ruthless, calculated massacre and left in its wake an abyss of sorrow, anger and vengefulness. If Sharon had himself entered Jenin and carried out these atrocities, the shock factor might not be so great, yet there were 20,000 israelis in that camp, operating under gestapo-like orders and thus, Israel is also going to suffer from this as well, as it must in the eyes of justice - if any justice can still be found in the world today.
At least half the camp has been flattened. The IDF set its bulldozers at the top of the hill and kept going until they reached the bottom. People were buried alive and the location of the bodies is done by a mixture of scenting out the corpses and getting recollections by survivors of who ran into which house, or under which set of stairs, during one or another F-16, Cobra or Apache attack. Three days ago a teenager was pulled out alive, but the rest of his family, all dead, are still under the rubble. i read that Shimon Peres is claiming only 3 non-combatants were killed and am truly stunned by the shameless embedded in such a statement. Based on what i have seen with my own eyes and smelled with my own nose, i think it is safe to safe there must be at least dozens, if not more, still laying under the pile. This does not include the places where people have told me they saw israeli soldiers dumping bodies into mass graves. We won't know the reality of this for some time, as it will be a while yet before people will turn their attention to someplace other than the pile.
Over the last week, our staff has been canvassing the North East, from New York to Washington DC. What we are finding, after talking to hundreds of people, is that the mass media blitz to sanitize Ariel Sharon is not taking. This could be the reason for the multi-million dollar crude pro-Sharon ads that now regularly appear on CNN and FOX.
After covering up Sharon's war crimes at Qibya and Sabra and Shatila, the media wizards are going into overdrive to clean up the evidence of the IDF's latest atrocities in Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and Ramallah. The Israeli government is attempting to delay or prevent a fact finding team from the United Nations.
However, members of the European parliament who visited Jenin today called it the scene of a war crime. Every day brings additional evidence to support these findings. Women and children have been murdered in cold blood, some were shot by Israeli snipers enforcing curfews, others were shot after they surrendered. For nine days, injured Palestinians were left to bleed to death, while medical personnel were prevented from reaching them. Hundreds of homes were demolished and bombed, often with the inhabitants inside.
HEBRON, West Bank: Israeli troops have entered Hebron, the one major Palestinian town Israel has not occupied during its West Bank offensive. Witnesses say troops appear to be searching for activists, not launching a full-scale invasion.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian group Hamas is calling on children not to attack illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In a statement, Hamas says the loss of too many children in such attacks would hurt the future of the Palestinian people.
In Gaza Wednesday, Israeli soldiers killed three armed Palestinian boys who were trying to enter a Jewish settlement. The 13- and 14-year-old classmates left behind notes indicating they knew their action would be fatal.
In Bethlehem Wednesday, shooting broke out at the Church of the Nativity as Israeli and Palestinian officials began more talks aimed at ending the stand-off at the Christian shrine.
The Council of Europe held "an urgent debate on the situation in the Middle East" on Thursday and decided to recommend that the European Union suspend its economic agreement with Israel.
The Council also decided to call on the EU to impose an arms embargo against Israel, due to allegations of human rights abuses in the territories.
A small number of Council members protested the decisions against Israel, including representatives from Hungary, France, and Germany.
In the meantime, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat met Thursday with foreign ministers Ismail Cem from Turkey and George Papandreou from Greece in the Palestinian leader's Ramallah headquarters, where he is under siege by Israeli forces.
Norway has already decided to prohibit military procurement from Israeli companies. R.B. Tec, a developer of electronic surveillance systems based in Ramat Hasharon, received a letter Wednesday from the Norwegian Defense Ministry explaining that the company could not compete for a Norwegian Army tender due to the situation in the Middle East.
There have been several cases of European countries canceling or suspending export permits for military components to Israel, but the Norwegian decision marks the first instance of a European country imposing a boycott on military procurement from Israel due to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
OCCUPIED-AL-QUDS: The Israeli army on Wednesday arrested a Palestinian photographer working for the Agence France-Presse (AFP) near the southern West Bank city of Hebron, journalists at the scene said.
AFP photographer Hossam Abu Alan and Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana were arrested at 1030 GMT at the Israeli army checkpoint of Beit Einun just to the north of Hebron as they were trying to reach the nearby village of Bani Naim to cover the funeral of two militants killed earlier by the army.
Abu Alan was blindfolded and handcuffed and led to an armoured personnel carrier at the roadblock while Dana, whose camera was seized, was held at the checkpoint. When a small group of journalists tried to approach them to hand the army Abu Alan's identity card, they were dispersed by the soldiers firing in the air.
Dana was released three hours later, but Reuters said his camera had not been returned. Abu Alan was transported off in an army jeep toward an unknown destination. The head of the Israeli government press office said Abu Alan had been "detained for questioning." An army spokeswoman said Abu Alan had been arrested for entering Zone C -- areas under Israeli civil and security control that covers the majority of the West Bank -- without a government press card.
The majority of the 11,000 residents remaining in the still besieged refugee camp spent another 48 hours without proper food, medical care or water, the last being the main problem during the heatwave.
I set off from Jerusalem for Jenin in a minibus with Christina Storm from the US branch of Lawyers Without Borders, a correspondent for Sawt Al Arab, the Voice of the Arabs in Cairo, and two Belgian journalists.
We crawled through heavy traffic in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and then sped along the coast road, going north.
At some distance from the village of Taibeh on the old Israel-West Bank ceasefire line we met up with two other groups which had arrived earlier.
The first consisted of four or five members of the International Solidarity Movement.
They said two of their colleagues coming from Jenin were attempting to reach this spot to collect supplies and equipment needed in Jenin.
They had been fired on.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia has sent eight brigades to its border with Jordan after receiving intelligence reports that Israel was massing troops along the Jordanian border, Saudi officials said Tuesday.
In Israel, an army spokesman said Israel had not increased its troops along the border with Jordan.
Some countries neighboring Israel have stepped up their military readiness in response to Israel's call-up of its reserves, a U.S. official in Washington has said recently. However, there was no sign of any offensive activities, according to the official.
The eight brigades, compromising 8,000 soldiers equipped with armored personnel carriers and missile launchers, moved into the Tabuk region in northern Saudi Arabia, the officials said.
They said Saudi intelligence reports showed that Israeli forces had amassed on Israel's southern border with Jordan. A 25-kilometer (15.5-mile) strip of Jordanian territory separates Israel from Saudi Arabia.
Orders for the brigades to advance to the border were given last week, said the officials.
The officials said the Saudi air force was instructed to intercept Israeli fighters that enter Saudi airspace and engage them only if the Israeli fighters didn't leave.
Israel's efforts to defend its conduct in the Jenin refugee camp are fast unravelling with revelations, published in The Independent today, that nearly half of the Palestinian dead identified so far were civilians.
After five days of interviews with survivors of the assault – conducted alongside a Human Rights Watch investigator – detailed accounts have emerged of widespread atrocities committed by Israeli troops inside the camp.
Israel has insisted that it has nothing to hide about the events in Jenin, the scene of eight days of fighting, but its officials say it may bar entry to a UN fact- finding team unless it can determine some of the members and define its terms of reference.
A high-level delegation from Israel is due at UN headquarters to see the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, this morning. UN officials said Mr Annan was unwilling to alter the line-up of the mission's three main members.
JERUSALEM (AP) - The first stages of construction work are under way to connect two West Bank settlements by building housing for 480 Jewish families, an Israeli official said Wednesday.
The settlement linking the Elkana and Shaarei Tikva settlements near Tel Aviv will cover about 90 acres, making it among the largest in the northern West Bank region, said Marcel Ganz, mayor of the Elkana Council, which is responsible for the development.
Ganz said the construction was approved by the Israeli government more than two years ago and ground preparations are well under way. Building is to start in a few months and families could begin moving in within a year, he said.
About 700 Jewish families now live in Elkana and Shaarei Tikva settlements. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip (news - web sites), about 200,000 Jews live in 150 settlements among 3 million Palestinians.
The settlement issue is one of the main stumbling blocks in the search for a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace. The Palestinians demand removal of settlements from West Bank land they consider part of any future state.
Israel's currency is hitting new lows, driven down by investors' alarm at the prospect of fresh taxes to combat a swelling budget deficit.
On Wednesday morning the shekel sank 1.4% to a new low against the dollar of 4.85.
The cabinet this week agreed to a capital gains tax and a tax on savings interest, in the hope of raising 3bn shekels ($627m; £433m) to help close the gap in the public accounts.
No Israeli government has succeeded in introducing a tax on capital gains.
The West Bank incursion has hiked defence bills
But the current situation - with defence bills bloated by 18 months of Palestinian resistance and three weeks of armoured incursion into the West Bank, just as an economic crunch is reducing tax receipts - means desperate measures are needed.
JERUSALEM (AP) - The first stages of construction work are under way to connect two West Bank settlements by building housing for 480 Jewish families, an Israeli official said Wednesday.
The settlement linking the Elkana and Shaarei Tikva settlements near Tel Aviv will cover about 90 acres, making it among the largest in the northern West Bank region, said Marcel Ganz, mayor of the Elkana Council, which is responsible for the development.
Ganz said the construction was approved by the Israeli government more than two years ago and ground preparations are well under way. Building is to start in a few months and families could begin moving in within a year, he said.
About 700 Jewish families now live in Elkana and Shaarei Tikva settlements. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip (news - web sites), about 200,000 Jews live in 150 settlements among 3 million Palestinians.
The settlement issue is one of the main stumbling blocks in the search for a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace. The Palestinians demand removal of settlements from West Bank land they consider part of any future state.
Egyptian Prime Minister Atef Ebeid said his country would go to war with Israel if Arab countries stumped up $US100 billion ($A186.32 billion) to pay for the confrontation, in an interview published yesterday.
"If you want to undertake an action and be ready to face up to challenges, you need at least $100 billion," he told the Abu Dhabi Government's Al-Ittihad newspaper when asked why Egypt had taken no measures against Israel's military offensive against the Palestinians.
"I told you we want $100 billion," he repeated in response to a question why Cairo had not expelled Israel's ambassador to Egypt.
"Let the Arab world give $100 billion from Arab funds deposited around the world. Let it say to Egypt: 'This is a budget for confrontation. This budget is at your disposal. Undertake confrontation,' " he said.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak accused Israel yesterday of going "beyond all limits" with its military actions in the West Bank, particularly in Bethlehem and Jenin.
Egypt became the first Arab country to make peace with Israel and signed a treaty in 1979. Protesters in Egypt have frequently called for cutting diplomatic ties with Israel and expelling the Israeli ambassador.
The thought was as unshakable as the stench wafting from the ruins. Was this really about counterterrorism? Was it revenge? Or was it an episode – the nastiest so far – in a long war by Ariel Sharon, the staunch opponent of the Oslo accords, to establish Israel's presence in the West Bank as permanent, and force the Palestinians into final submission?
A neighbourhood had been reduced to a moonscape, pulverised under the tracks of bulldozers and tanks. A maze of cinder-block houses, home to about 800 Palestinian families, had disappeared. What was left – the piles of broken concrete and scattered belongings – reeked.
The rubble in Jenin reeked, literally, of rotting human corpses, buried underneath. But it also gave off the whiff of wrongdoing, of an army and a government that had lost its bearings. "This is horrifying beyond belief," said the United Nations' Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, as he gazed at the scene. He called it a "blot that will forever live on the history of the state of Israel" – a remark for which he was to be vilified by Israelis. Even the painstakingly careful United States envoy, William Burns, was unusually outspoken as he trudged across the ruins. "It's obvious that what happened in Jenin refugee camp has caused enormous suffering for thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians," he said.
Wednesday, April 24, 2002
In a move that was likely to dramatically sharpen international criticism of Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided late Tuesday to withhold his government's cooperation, for the time being, with a UN fact-finding mission to probe the events that unfolded during the IDF's operation in the Jenin refugee camp.
Senior political sources said the decision - taken following a deliberation between Sharon, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and foreign ministry officials in Jerusalem - was largely motivated by the fear that Israel would not be treated fairly by the UN team. The sources described the delegation as having a political rather than a professional make-up.
"We weren't happy with the fact that there was no military presence on the team," one Israeli official told Reuters.
The sources also said that Israel had not been fully consulted on matters regarding the mission, and that the team's mandate contradicted the agreement reached with Israel. The sources added that Israel fears the team's mandate will be expanded to investigate IDF actions in other West Bank towns.
Israel's ambassador to the UN, Yehuda Lancry, was to inform Secretary General Kofi Annan of the decision later Tuesday. The team had been scheduled to arrive in Israel on Thursday.
Earlier in the day, Sharon had told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Israel had been left with no choice but to accept the fact-finding team to the camp, but that he feared the outcome of the mission.
Ariel Sharon may be planning a military offensive against the Gaza Strip, the heartland of anti-Israeli militancy.
The Israeli Prime Minister told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee that "terror" in the Gaza Strip was "ongoing", remarks that will seen by many Israelis as an indication that tanks and troops are poised to strike.
Gaza is said by sources to be "wired" for an attack, raising the possibility of a battle that could dwarf the nine-day conflict that led to the devastation of Jenin refugee camp.
Ominously, a senior Israeli army officer reported to the same committee yesterday that there had recently been 250 "terror attacks" in the strip.
Beirut, Lebanon (MENO) - Saudi Arabia has deployed troops to the northwest of the kingdom over the past two weeks following Israeli airforce "activity" over the kingdom's border with Jordan, a Gulf military source said on Tuesday.
"Saudi Arabia has been deploying military reinforcements over the past two weeks to Tabuk province, close to the border with Jordan," the source told AFP.
The deployment "was decided after the Saudi military command noted Israeli air activity above border zones" between the kingdom and Jordan, he added.
The Saudi army is preparing for "any eventuality that could result from Israeli aggression in the region," he said. Units from the joint military force of the six Gulf Arab monarchies, dubbed "Peninsula Shield", also received the order to deploy to Tabuk from their base in Hafr al-Baten in northeastern Saudi Arabia. "Mechanised infantry units moved towards the Tabuk region three days ago. But they then received the order to return to base," the source said.
Tuesday, April 23, 2002
JERUSALEM Israeli-Palestinian relations settled into a tense stalemate today, as an American envoy met with Yasir Arafat without resolving twin sieges in Ramallah and Bethlehem that are threatening to stir new violence a day after Israel ended its military sweep through the West Bank.
As they maintained their blockade of Palestinian cities, Israeli forces returned today to conducting lethal, pinpoint strikes, killing at least seven Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and losing one soldier.
Palestinian ministers expressed fears that Israeli forces would storm Mr. Arafat's compound in Ramallah, where the meeting with the American envoy took place today, in pursuit of wanted men, a step Israel has not ruled out.
At his wrecked security compound, which Israel attacked in what it called a search for terrorists, Jibril Rajoub, the head of Palestinian preventive security forces in the West Bank, said that security cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians was now impossible.
"I think that the Israelis buried everything," said Mr. Rajoub, whose popularity has declined in part because he was seen by Palestinians as too cooperative with the United States and Israel. "A sea of blood and hatred has been created between us and the Israelis. I don't think that security coordination or bilateral relations with the Israelis is on our agenda right now."
While Zionists and many Jews cheered the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, for the Arabs who fled their homes in what became Israel, it was a disaster. They were never allowed to return. UN Resolutions demanding Israel respect the right of return guaranteed under international law were ignored, the Zionist state shielded from censure and sanctions by a United States prepared to exercise its Security Council veto. Today, any Jew can immigrate to Israel. Arabs who fled what became Israel can't. But some can gaze upon their former homes, or what might have been their homes, from squalid, crowded refugee camps only miles from where they, or their parents, or grandparents once lived, exiled for who they are, never to return for the demographic threat they are.
While diaspora Palestinians continue to demand they be allowed to return to their homes, commentators dismiss the demand as unreasonable. It would change the ethnic face of Israel, they say, threatening the ascendant place of Jews in the country's political and social structure. Palestinians are expected to live with their dispossession, quashing their demands for justice in the face of the indifference -- if not open hostility -- of the two powers in whose hands their fate resides: Israel and the United States.
In 1967, more Palestinians fled, often to refugee camps, with names like Sabra and Shatilla. Ariel Sharon, directing Israeli operations in occupied Lebanon, looked the other way as Israel's ally, the Christian Falangists, ran rampant through the camp, slaughtering men, women and children -- an earlier operation to root out the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. Terrorism finds fertile ground in dispossession, injustice, humiliation.
There is full agreement between all those who were in the Jenin refugee camp on only one thing. A week after the end of the fighting, foreign journalists and IDF soldiers, UN representatives and hired hacks in the Israeli media, members of the welfare organizations and government propagandists all report that a terrible stench of decomposing bodies lingers everywhere.
Apart from that there is no agreement on anything. The Palestinians speak about a massacre amounting to a second Sabra and Shatila. The IDF speak about hard fighting, in which "the most humane army in the world" did not intentionally hurt even one single civilian. The Palestinians speak about hundreds of dead, the Minister of Defense asserts categorically that exactly 43 were killed.
So what is the truth? The simple answer is: nobody knows. Nobody can possibly know.
The truth lies buried under the debris, and it smells atrociously
ATLANTA — In January 1996, with full support from Israel and responding to the invitation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Carter Center helped to monitor a democratic election in the West Bank and Gaza, which was well organized, open and fair. In that election, 88 members were elected to the Palestinian National Authority, with Yasir Arafat as president. Legally and practically, the Palestinian people were encouraged to form their own government, with the expectation that they would soon have full sovereignty as a state.
When the election was over, I made a strong effort to persuade the leaders of Hamas to accept the election results, with Mr. Arafat as their leader. I relayed a message offering them full participation in the process of developing a permanent constitutional framework for the new political entity, but they refused to accept this proposal. Despite this rejection, it was a time of peace and hope, and there was no threat of violence or even peaceful demonstrations. The legal status of the Palestinian people has not changed since then, but their plight has grown desperate.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed a three-member fact-finding team led by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari to determine what happened during Israel's military assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.
The other two members are Cornelio Sommaruga, former president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Sadako Ogata, the former UN high commissioner for refugees who is Japan's special envoy on Afghan reconstruction.
Ahtisaari said he hopes the team will arrive in the West Bank later this week.
THE BUSH Administration, already struggling to mediate an end to hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians, came under renewed pressure yesterday to soften its criticism of Ariel Sharon and even consider boosting military assistance to the Israelis.
While the Israeli Prime Minister faced a barrage of international protest for his military offensive in the West Bank, in Washington the talk yesterday was restricted to how the US could help him.
The pro-Israeli sentiment was expressed at the annual conference of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the main Jewish lobby group and one of the the most powerful forces in American politics.
Senior Republicans, including members of the Administration, and leading congressmen from both parties have pledged unwavering support for Israel. The public declarations could limit Mr Bush’s room for manoeuvre, particularly since some of the most strident pro-Israeli voices are coming from the right wing of his own Republican party.
Powell suggested that Arafat's confinement to his Ramallah compound has inhibited his ability to deliver guidance and instructions to his subordinates.
"I think the more access he is given, the opportunity he is given to show whether or not he can control forces or bring this security situation under control," Powell said on NBC's Meet the Press.
Israel has confined Arafat to his Ramallah headquarters since December. He has had access to only a few rooms of his offices since Israeli troops overran the compound three weeks ago.
"If he moves onto that new path and makes the very best effort he can to stay on the path and convince the Palestinian people that is the right path to lead to a Palestinian state, then there is much the United States can do for him and the peace process," Powell said.
Israel has declared an end to what it called the first stage of its West Bank offensive by withdrawing its forces from the centre of Nablus and parts of Ramallah while setting up blockades of both cities.
After its biggest ground operation since it invaded Lebanon 20 years ago, Israel has left troops poised inside Palestinian-controlled territory for further strikes.
Soldiers and tanks continued to occupy the Ramallah compound of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and to surround the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem's Manger Square. Israel is insisting that wanted men it believes to be inside the two places should be handed over.
Palestinian ministers denounced Israel's part withdrawal of troops as a sham.
The European Union issued "a serious warning against any act of force carried out against the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which could endanger the physical security of President Arafat and the [other] people there".
On Sunday a team of more than 25 international sympathisers, who thought an attack was about to be launched on the headquarters, tried to break through the Israeli Army cordon and join Mr Arafat as human shields.
JENIN, West Bank, April 21 (UPI) -- Palestinian eyewitnesses have given United Press International detailed accounts of the Israeli military's incursion into Jenin, describing firefights in the tight alleyways that make up much of the refugee camp, and a pattern of house demolition and the use of heavy munitions by Israeli soldiers that appears to have killed many civilians, and left survivors at risk from hunger and disease.
Israeli soldiers would demolish any building they took fire from by using tanks and armored bulldozers, inhabitants of the camp told UPI.
If they saw any movement inside the house, they would open up on it with heavy-caliber weapons, pause to see if anyone would come out and then flatten it. On other occasions, they blew the doors off with explosives and charged in firing automatic weapons, residents say.
Sometimes, they pushed civilians in ahead of them.
Residents say these tactics were adopted after 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in one day by a combination of suicide bombs, snipers and booby traps. Israel has defended its operation, saying its purpose was to root out terrorists in the camp.
"I was standing by my window, watching this tank coming down the street, when suddenly one of the soldiers saw me and fired in my direction," Maryam Ayasi -- apparently still in a state of shock -- told UPI.
The Israeli government will not discuss the removal of any settlements until the next elections to the Knesset in October 2003, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon angrily declared yesterday at the weekly cabinet meeting, banging his hand on the table to emphasize that there would also be no such discussion after those elections if he is reelected.
The subject was raised when he was asked by Labor Party minister without portfolio, Ra'anan Cohen, why the government does not adopt IDF officer recommendations to evacuate isolated settlements, as reported on Friday night's Channel Two News program. It quoted unidentified "senior IDF officers" as saying isolated settlements should be evacuated, especially in the Gush Katif area in Gaza. The officers, said the station's military analyst, argued that the isolated settlements have become tremendous security burdens, requiring a regiment of soldiers to protect each one.
The Council for Security and Peace, an organization of some 1,000 former senior officers from the IDF, Shin Bet security service, Mossad, and the police believes there are some 40 such settlements in the West Bank and, in its plan for a unilateral withdrawal from the territories, says all of Gaza's settlements should be evacuated, except in the northwest corner of the strip.
Israel's foreign minister yesterday confirmed a report that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wants to annex up to half of the West Bank.
But Shimon Peres said he does not see this as a permanent solution to the crisis in the Middle East.
Interviewed yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press," the foreign minister was asked about the accuracy of a report yesterday in the London Sunday Telegraph, also published in The Washington Times, that Mr. Sharon has a plan calling for Israel to annex 50 percent of land in the West Bank.
"It's accurate for a while, because that's what Sharon suggests as an interim agreement," Mr. Peres said. "My judgment is they know this is not a solution" and that this is an "unofficial proposal."
The International Committee of the Red Cross yesterday accused Israel of breaching the Geneva conventions by recklessly endangering civilian lives and property during its assault on the Jenin refugee camp, and by refusing the injured access to medical personnel for six days.
Amnesty International concurred and called for an investigation on the same basis as the war crimes inquiries in the Balkans.
The allegations came as the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, named a fact-finding team to look into the 10 days of fighting in Jenin between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants. It will be led by the former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, who will be joined by Sadako Ogata, former UN high commissioner for refugees, and Cornelio Sommaruga, the ICRC's former head.
The Palestinians claim that the Israeli military massacred up to 500 people in the camp. Israel says about 40 people died, plus 23 of its troops.
The killing continued in other parts of the occupied territories yesterday as Israeli soldiers shot dead five Palestinians - two in Gaza and three in West Bank villages - and Palestinian militants in Ramallah shot three alleged collaborators with Israel, killing one man. The Israeli army said it arrested a 17-year-old Palestinian woman in Gaza who was on her way to carry out a suicide attack.