Two Palestinian men were shot dead on Sunday in the northern West Bank, one in a gunbattle with Israeli troops, the other allegedly shot by a Jewish settler in an olive grove, and Israeli tanks were on the move in Gaza.
Early Monday, about 40 Israeli tanks entered the Gaza city of Khan Younis from two directions, witnesses said. Israeli troops exchanged fire with armed Palestinians, they said, and ambulances raced to the scene, but there was no immediate report of casualties. The Israeli military had no comment.
Palestinians accused Jewish settlers of killing Hani Yousef (22) as he was harvesting olives near his village, Aqraba. Another Palestinian farmer was shot and wounded by the settlers, who came from the nearby settlement of Itamar, according to the Palestinian mayor, Ghaled Mayadme.
Israeli police representative Gil Kleiman said the farmer’s death was being investigated, but no arrests had been made. The farmer had been shot in the back, he said.
In the Jenin Refugee Camp, also in the northern West Bank, Israeli troops killed Samer Jalamneh, a 22-year-old member of the radical Islamic Jihad movement, after he opened fire at them with an assault rifle, witnesses and the military said.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, speaking from the remnants of his Ramallah compound, accused the Israeli army of covering up settlers’ actions.
”The army is protecting their daily crimes against Palestinian residents in their homes and against Palestinian farmers,” Arafat said after a meeting with Jacob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of Red Cross, who is touring Israel and Palestinian areas this week.
Also, the Palestine Legislative Council gave Arafat another four weeks to appoint a new Cabinet, following the resignation of his previous Cabinet last month, Palestinian parliament speaker Ahmed Qureia said.
Arafat asked the legislature for an extension on his original two-week deadline to name a new Cabinet after Israeli troops besieged his Ramallah compound, destroying several buildings. Palestinian reform plans were put on hold during the siege. In Jerusalem, four Arab residents of the city’s traditionally Arab eastern sector, accused of helping bombers carry out three attacks that killed 35 people and wounded almost 200, went on trial amid a flood of insults from relatives of the Israeli victims.
”Son of a whore,” shouted the father of one Israeli victim. ”Stinking Arabs,” shouted a middle-aged Israeli woman. ”You should all be strung up on a crane,” said Gila Arazi, aunt of Danit Dagan, who was killed with her fiancee, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the Cafe Moment in Jerusalem on March 9. In addition to that attack, which killed 11, the group is accused of helping to arrange a suicide bombing that killed 15 at a pool hall in Rishon Letzion, near Tel Aviv, and planting a bomb at a cafeteria in Jerusalem’s Hebrew University that killed five Americans and four Israelis.
Inside the courtroom, the four accused and their families were protected by riot police, who stood in a row facing the angry relatives of the victims. The accused, Wael Qassem, Wissam Abassi, Ala Abassi and Muhammed Oudeh, sat handcuffed to prison guards. The prisoners’ legs were also shackled.
The case is unusual because the accused are residents of east Jerusalem, annexed by Israel after its capture in the 1967 Middle East war. Arabs in east Jerusalem regard themselves as Palestinians and support the Palestinian cause, but few have been involved in the Middle East violence over the past two years.
Because they live in Jerusalem, the accused have Israeli identity cards, which enabled them to move freely, unlike Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, who are prevented from entering Israel.
Israel has decided to seal the apartments of the accused with concrete instead of blowing them up, the army’s weekly journal Bamachane reported in its latest edition.
In the West Bank, dozens of houses belonging to the families of militants have been blown up recently, leaving hundreds of people homeless. But Colonel Yossi Eluz, an engineering corps officer, said the apartments would be sealed because, ”we want to hit only the apartments of the terrorists. We don’t want to harm innocent civilians.”
On the political front, European Union envoys Javier Solana and Miguel Moratinos had meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials in an attempt to revive the peace process. Palestinian security chief Mohammed Dahlan said he and the envoys were both trying to stop Palestinian bomb attacks inside Israel. Israel’s Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told the European officials that statements by European leaders expressing sympathy for Arafat were not encouraging the emergence of a moderate leadership in the Palestinian Authority. – Sapa-AP