Thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets of Rafah on Monday to bury 16 of those killed in Israel’s offensive, hours after the army ended its occupation of the battered Tal al-Sultan area.
Meanwhile, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was due to meet Egypt’s intelligence chief General Omar Suleiman in Ramallah to discuss the week-long raid in southern Gaza, which has thus far left 43 Palestinians dead.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, under global pressure to put a stop to the repression in Rafah, has pledged to put his revised plan for a gradual military withdrawal from the entire Gaza Strip to his cabinet next Sunday.
Tanks and troops that had encircled Tal al-Sultan, the site of last week’s most deadly clashes, pulled out in the early hours of Monday as the military continued to scale back its controversial Operation Rainbow.
”Troops have been redeployed and the encirclement of Tal al-Sultan is no longer being implemented,” said an Israeli army spokesperson.
The soldiers had forcibly taken over houses in the neighbourhood at the beginning of the operation last Tuesday to secure vantage points for teams of army snipers. Many homes had been either fully or partially demolished.
After the occupation was lifted, about 10 000 Palestinians, some of them armed, marched in a mass funeral procession to bury 16 of those killed in Rafah, chanting the usual pledges of bloody revenge.
As the mourners headed for the town’s main football stadium, an Israeli tank unleashed a sustained burst of machine-gun fire on the crowd, wounding two Palestinians, according to sources at the Rafah hospital.
The procession was re-routed but, under the supervision of Palestinian security services, finally reached the stadium.
Jaser al-Sher, whose two sons were shot dead by Israeli forces, said he had been offered the opportunity to attend a limited funeral with a handful of family members but had rejected it.
”I did not want to bury them alone. I want the whole town to pay their respects to them,” he said.
But the army continued to demolish homes in the al-Brazil neighbourhood of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, with tanks providing cover for bulldozers. Soldiers in a tank opened fire at people trying to approach the site.
Israel has been the target of sharp international criticism over the house demolitions in Rafah, which it says is necessary to prevent increasingly sophisticated weapons from being smuggled in under the border from Egypt.
Justice Minister Tommy Lapid sparked uproar among his cabinet colleagues on Sunday when he said images of an elderly Palestinian woman searching through the rubble of her Rafah home reminded him of his grandmother who was killed during the Holocaust.
Lapid, a survivor of the Nazi genocide, condemned the Rafah operation as immoral and inhumane, earning a stinging rebuke from Sharon, who accused him of feeding the ”anti-Israeli propaganda machine”.
Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz told the cabinet the operation ”would continue for several days, but not for several weeks”.
Meanwhile, Sharon said he would present his revamped Gaza withdrawal plan to his government next Sunday, after unveiling the measure to key military and security officials.
”I have been fighting for 60 years, and I will do what I say,” Sharon said on Sunday at a military ceremony south of Tel Aviv, Israeli public radio reported.
The new plan calls for a phased military pullout as well as the evacuation of 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and a few in the northern West Bank.
In Ramallah, Suleiman — who has in the past been involved in several mediation efforts in a bid to revive the stalled Middle East peace process — was expected to discuss the situation in Rafah with Arafat.
Suleiman was also expected to meet Sharon, Israeli media reported.
Elsewhere, a Palestinian teenager was killed on Monday in clashes with Israeli troops in the Nablus refugee camp of Balata, bringing to 4 083 the number of people killed since the latest Palestinian uprising in September 2000. – Sapa-AFP