Nablus, West Bank | Wednesday
AFTER taking over the biblical city of Bethlehem, Israeli forces early Wednesday moved into the West Bank towns of Jenin and Salfit, Palestinian security sources and the Israeli army said.
Israeli forces took over Bethlehem on Tuesday in their drive against Palestinian towns on the West Bank, killing five people in the latest fighting and bombarding the headquarters of the regional security chief.
Elsewhere on the West Bank, Ramallah central hospital said it had started burying corpses in its parking lot after the town’s morgue overflowed under the death toll of Israel’s five-day-old invasion and ambulances were unable to reach the cemetery.
Heavy clashes broke out between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli troops as some 50 tanks made their way from the outskirts to the centre of Jenin in the northern West Bank.
A Palestinian woman died after being hit in the head by a bullet in her home in Jenin refugee camp, said Palestinian medical sources.
The Israeli army confirmed the incursion, issuing a statement saying that reservists together with tank and engineering forces were working through Jenin, controlling positions throughout the city.
”Once the forces are settled in the city, they will begin operating to locate and arrest terrorist activists and seize weapons,” the army said in a statement.
More than 20 Israeli tanks meanwhile moved into the autonomous West Bank town of Salfit, some 20 kilometres south-west of Nablus, said Palestinian security sources.
Around 400 tanks were mustering on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Nablus, but had not yet entered it, they added.
An Israeli army representative confirmed the incursion, saying it was part of the Israeli Defence Force’s ”fight against the infrastructure of terror” in the West Bank.
”The IDF went into the town of Salfit, south of (the Jewish settlement of) Ariel, during which time the Palestinians opened fire. IDF forces returned fire but no injuries were reported,” she said, adding that ”two armed terrorists were arrested in their car in the town”.
Israeli forces fired on several churches in Bethlehem on Tuesday, church officials said, adding that a priest previously reportedly slain was alive.
Father Raed Awad, secretary to the patriarch of the Roman Catholic Church in Jerusalem, also said some nuns might have been injured as Israeli tanks took over the city. But he could not confirm previous reports that seven had been shot.
Also caught up in the turmoil of the operation launched two days after Easter was Bethlehem’s main Omar mosque which caught fire late Tuesday Around 150 people, 20 of them wounded, were stranded inside the Church of the Nativity in central Bethlehem after taking shelter from Israeli gunfire, Palestinian witnesses said.
Israeli forces on Tuesday killed three Palestinian militants and a teenage bystander in a shootout in Bethlehem, Palestinian security sources said.
The Israelis also shot dead another Palestinian man as he was driving his car in the town of Hebron to the south, the sources said.
And a Palestinian militant was killed by soldiers near the Erez crossing point between the northern Gaza Strip and Israel late on Tuesday.
Bethlehem was the fifth town taken as Israeli troops swept the West Bank hunting for Palestinian militants after laying siege to Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah on Friday.
Despite growing international criticism of Israel’s onslaught, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intensified the pressure on Arafat, saying that if he was allowed to leave it would be alone and on a ”one way ticket.”
The Palestinian leadership rejected the offer of escape from Ramallah, accusing Sharon of aiming to kill Arafat.
Israeli tanks and helicopters, backed by snipers, also pounded the CIA-equipped headquarters of Arafat’s security chief, Colonel Jibril Rajoub, saying it was hiding around 250 people, including some of the militants on Israel’s most-wanted list.
Five buses left the besieged compound in the village of Beitunya near Ramallah with about 180 people on board and headed toward an Israeli army base, witnesses and Palestinian security officials said.
The Israelis launched a withering barrage of tank, helicopter and machinegun fire at the headquarters, engulfing the main building in flames, according to witnesses.
There was no word on the whereabouts of Rajoub, head of the West Bank preventive security services.
Israel seized Ramallah early on Friday when Sharon sent in troops to pin down and ”isolate” Arafat, whom he blames for 18 months of violence that have left more than 1 670 people dead.
The Israeli army says it has rounded up 500 Palestinians in recent days in a house-to-house sweep in the city.
The Jewish state’s forces have also rolled into the towns of Tulkarem, Qalqilya and Beit Jala in their biggest military offensive on the West Bank since the 1967 Middle East war.
Amid fears of an escalation beyond the Palestinian territories, Israeli jets carried out air strikes on areas of south Lebanon near the disputed Shebaa Farms after Hezbollah rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli positions in the region.
The Shiite Hezbollah guerrilla movement’s Al-Manar television reported that three Israeli soldiers were wounded, but there was no independent confirmation. – Sapa-AFP