The Israeli army killed at least seven Palestinians in a series of ”targeted assassinations” in the West Bank yesterday.
Among the dead were a senior member of Islamic Jihad, the alleged head of a suicide bombing cell and three teenagers.
The killings came as Israeli troops reoccupied Bethlehem and imposed a curfew two days after pulling out of the town for Christmas.
The most prominent Palestinian to die yesterday was Hamsa Abu Roub, the Islamic Jihad leader in Qabatiyah, near Jenin. The army said he was shot when he opened fire after soldiers tried to arrest him. Palestinian witnesses said he died after troops threw a grenade into his home and then stormed through the door. A few hours later the army blew up the house.
An undercover army unit also killed Jamal Yehi, who the Israelis said headed an Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade suicide squad in Tulkarm. Yehi was unarmed when he was shot.
A similar army squad killed a Palestinian described as a Hamas activist in Ramallah. Palestinian sources said Israeli soldiers, disguised as Arabs, shot Bassam al-Askar, who was unarmed, on the street and then dragged his body into a military vehicle.
A 19-year-old bystander was also killed when, according to the army, Palestinians began stoning the undercover troops.
In Nablus, two members of the Fatah militia Tanzim, one of them 16, were shot dead by an army patrol searching for ”wanted Palestinians”.
Palestinian sources said another youth was killed by troops after residents took to the streets of the old city in Nablus to protest against the reimposition of a curfew that has been in place nearly continuously over the past five months. The army said it had no knowledge of the killing.
Five Israeli soldiers were wounded during yesterday’s incidents.
Earlier, the government said that it is to extend no-go areas for Palestinians – where soldiers are free to shoot on sight – to new buffer zones around Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
The ”special security zones”, several hundred metres wide, will require the further seizure of Palestinian land in addition to that already being lost to a 250-mile”security fence” under construction along the length of the West Bank’s border with Israel.
The new zones, marked out by barbed wire and guard towers, will surround more than 200 000 Jews living in about 150 settlements.
The army’s rules of engagement permit soldiers to fire at will at anyone suspected of trying to infiltrate the buffer zones.
The government has described the additional zones as a measure to protect settlers by ”engaging terrorists before they enter the settlement”.
But the Palestinians say the move will be used to extend the creeping colonisation of the West Bank.
Obayed’s grandson, Mohammed, described the sentence as so light as to encourage Israeli soldiers to kill more innocent Palestinians.
Israeli military prisons for soldiers are renowned among ex-inmates for their comforts. – Guardian Unlimited Â