Jewish Peace News
[JPN Commentary: The article below provides a preview of a more extensive interview given to Ha'aretz which will appear in its Friday magazine this week. In it, Dov Weisglass, a long-time senior aide to Ariel Sharon lays bare the Israeli strategy in the Gaza withdrawal. But it is also the blueprint for Sharon's overall strategy.
In essence, the unilateral Gaza withdrawal plan accomplishes two things. One, thanks to the remarkable naiveté and short-sightedness of the Bush administration, the plan won for Sharon an American promise that Israel would keep some part of the West Bank at the least (and also would not have to negotiate with the Palestinians over the claims of refugees wishing to return to their former homeland). Second, and more important, it caused the complete cessation of any kind of peace process.
Whatever one's estimation of the political processes that had been going on between Israel and the Palestinians for the past 13 years, the terms of any peace, even the most one-sided kind for Israel, would certainly have had to mean some concession on the main issues of refugees, Jerusalem and the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Now, with US backing, with Israel taking unilateral actions, with an impotent Palestinian Authority and groups like Hamas supplying the impetus for Israeli military incursions, there need be no political process.
What Sharon has always feared is a political settlement, because any political settlement would have to mean major settlement losses on the West Bank and some kind of Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem. Such is what would have occurred even under the ridiculously lopsided offers made by Barak to Arafat and under the somewhat less one-sided Geneva Initiative. But even this is anathema to Sharon. Yet his Gaza withdrawal plan has drawn intense criticism from the hard right wing in Israel. Weisglass' interview is likely aimed at dispelling at least some, if not most, of that right-wing wrath.
If Weisglass' words reached more people, especially Jews, it would surely prove that Ariel Sharon's efforts are not geared toward protecting the lives of Israeli Jews, much less toward peace, even on very favorable terms to Israel. As long as he can see a way to avoid any compromise at all, he will pursue it. If the Israeli lives he is sacrificing to his myopic ideology do not sway him, we can rest assured that the far greater number of Palestinian lives that his brutal and greedy policies will cost will not faze him one iota. – MP]
Top PM aide: Gaza plan aims to freeze the peace process
By Ari Shavit, Haaretz Correspondent
http://ga3.org/ct/07aCgtM1zBCM/
"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser Dov Weisglass told Haaretz, in an interview for the Friday Magazine.
Weisglass, who was one of the initiators of the disengagement plan, added, "And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."
"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," he said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
Asked why the disengagement plan had been hatched, Weisglass replied: "Because in the fall of 2003 we understood that everything was stuck. And although by the way the Americans read the situation, the blame fell on the Palestinians, not on us, Arik [Sharon] grasped that this state of affairs could not last, that they wouldn't leave us alone, wouldn't get off our case. Time was not on our side. There was international erosion, internal erosion. Domestically, in the meantime, everything was collapsing. The economy was stagnant, and the Geneva Initiative had gained broad support. And then we were hit with the letters of officers and letters of pilots and letters of commandos [refusing to serve in the territories]. These were not weird kids with green ponytails and a ring in their nose with a strong odor of grass. These were people like Spector's group [Yiftah Spector, a renowned Air Force pilot who signed the pilot's letter]. Really our finest young people."
Weisglass does not deny that the main achievement of the Gaza plan is the freezing of the peace process in a "legitimate manner."
"That is exactly what happened," he said. "You know, the term `peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
Sharon, he said, could also argue "honestly" that the disengagement plan was "a serious move because of which, out of 240,000 settlers, 190,000 will not be moved from their place."
The full interview will appear on Friday.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[JPN Commentary: It seems almost redundant, or at least perfunctory, to report that the United States has once again used its veto power to block a UN Security Council resolution. This one would have called on Israel to end its current invasion of Gaza.
The US and Israel insist that a resolution on this matter must be "balanced" yet they also rejected a version that Russia tried to put together, which would have equally condemned Hamas for launching the horrid missile attack against the town of Sderot inside Israel proper which took the lives of two Israeli children, aged 4 and 2. Apparently Israel and the US have a unique definition of "balance" which means that the UN can only act against one side, the Palestinians. With the death toll in Israel's Gaza invasion climbing over 80 and the injured in the hundreds, including many civilians and children, the Israeli characterization of the UN resolution as blaming the victim (i.e. Israel) is simply appalling. – MP]
U.S. vetoes UN resolution demanding end to Gaza offensive
By Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service and Agencies
http://ga3.org/ct/0daCgtM1zBCA/
NEW YORK - The United States on Tuesday vetoed a United Nations Security Council draft resolution demanding that Israel stop a major offensive in the Gaza Strip that has cost at least 80 Palestinian lives.
A total of 11 nations voted in favor. Britain, Germany and Romania abstained on the measure drafted by Arab nations.
Arab nations demanded in a draft UN Security Council resolution Monday that Israel immediately halt its incursion into northern Gaza.
The draft resolution, submitted to the council in an emergency meeting convened at the request of Arab nations on Monday, calls for an immediate halt to the offensive and calls on Israel and the Palestinians to immediately implement the internationally-backed road map peace plan.
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Dan Gillerman expressed his happiness after the vote and said that the resolution only condemned the victim and not the attacker.
Gillerman added that the nations which abstained showed courage while those that voted in favor were cowards.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Danforth cast the U.S. veto after British and German efforts to find compromise language failed.
"Once again, the resolution is lopsided and unbalanced," Danforth told the council just before voting "no."
"It is dangerously disingenuous because of its many material omissions. Because of this lack of balance, because of these omissions the resolution lacks credibility and deserves a 'no' vote," he said.
After the vote, Algeria's UN Ambassador Abdallah Baali, the only Arab member of the council, thanked the resolution's supporters and noted that the measure got more than the minimum nine "yes" votes needed for adoption absent a veto by one of the five permanent council members.
"It is a sad day for the Palestinians and it is a sad day for justice," Baali said.
The U.S. had earlier on Tuesday rejected a Russian-sponsored compromise to balance a UN Security Council condemnation of Israel for its operation in the Gaza Strip with a condemnation of Hamas for firing Qassam rockets at the western Negev town of Sderot.
Danforth had said Monday that if the resolution was passed "it would be a very terrible statement for the Security Council to make" because he said it acquiesces in terror against Israelis.
Shalom holding talks with European counterparts
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom on Tuesday held a series of talks with his European counterparts in an effort to prevent a unilateral condemnation of Israel.
Shalom met with foreign ministers from the Netherlands, Russia and Great Britain. He asked them to oppose any resolution that does not also condemn Qassam rocket attacks on Israel.
The European ministers said they condemn the attacks on Israel, but expect Israel to respond to them in a manner proportional to the Qassam threat.
Baali, the only Arab member of the council, requested the open meeting following the nearly weeklong Israeli offensive - the largest of its kind launched by Israel in four years in Gaza.
"Taking into account the gravity, the urgency of the situation, the seriousness of the situation, we need to have the Security Council take a decision quickly - and quickly means Tuesday at the latest," Baali said.
Gillerman, referring to the Security Council debate, said Monday that, "In the past, as well, the Americans have not allowed one-sided resolutions to pass. They understand that our activity is a response to Qassams, they understand that Israel has the right to self-defense."
The United States hopes Israel will quickly end its massive offensive in Gaza without expanding the operation, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Monday.
"I hope it does not expand and I hope whatever he does is proportionate to the threat that Israel is facing and I hope that this operation can come to a conclusion quickly," Powell told reporters aboard his plane as he flew to Brazil.
Powell said he could not judge if Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had overreacted and predicted the Israeli leader would end the offensive only when he perceived he had dealt with the threat from Palestinian rockets
Sharon's offensive "is not in contrast to the disengagement plan. He remains as committed to the disengagement plan and hopefully that will get on track," Powell said.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[JPN Commentary: This report gives an overview of the state of affairs under Israel's invasion. Little comment necessary, but it is worthwhile to make a special note of one case: that of a 13-year old Palestinian girl who was killed for going to school and, horror of horrors, carrying her schollbooks with her, which, naturally since she is Palestinian, the Israeli soldiers said they thought were a bomb.
For JVP's official statement on the Gaza invasion, click here. – MP]
Body count grows in besieged Gaza camp
by Mitch Potter, Toronto Star Mideast Bureau
http://ga3.org/ct/p1aCgtM1zBC2/
JABALIYA, Gaza Strip—The harvest of death in this most dispossessed of refugee camps continued yesterday as the Israeli army finished its first week in a grim, open-ended manhunt for Palestinian militants, killing 10 people and wounding at least nine.
With a body count of more than 80 Palestinians and three Israelis since operation "Days of Penitence" arrived in the northern Gaza Strip involving an estimated 200 tanks and 2,000 troops, the toll shows everywhere.
Street by narrow street, the 106,000 Palestinian refugees of Jabaliya are in an almost continuous state of mourning, as family and friends circulate among makeshift funeral tents throughout the squalid cinderblock camp, paying condolences under banners bearing the colours of Hamas, Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and Islamic Jihad, among others.
Today's festival of sorrow will include the funeral of Bashir al-Dabash, 38, overall military commander of Islamic Jihad and by far the highest-profile Gaza militant to fall under Israeli crosshairs since the assassination of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi last April.
Dabash and his bodyguard died at sunset yesterday when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile into the white Subaru they were driving near Gaza City's main hospital.
The missile made a piercing whistle just before exploding with a resounding boom that echoed through Gaza.
The Israeli army later released a statement acknowledging the attack, saying Dabash was responsible for dozens of attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers.
A second Israeli missile landed later last night in the heart of Jabaliya with a muffled thump, killing two militants wearing the colours of Al Aqsa and wounded eight others, a blend of fighters and civilians, according to Palestinian medical sources.
News wire services reported Israeli tank fire killed three Palestinians and wounded 10 children in the northern Gaza Strip early today. Medics told Reuters that tank shells killed a 15-year-old Palestinian in one house and two men in another before dawn in the besieged town of Beit Lahiya. Another shell hit a house where a family was sleeping, wounding 10 children, the youngest just six months old.
Among others killed in Gaza yesterday was a 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl, Iman Al Hams, her body riddled with as many as 20 bullets when she dropped her bag and ran after hearing a warning shot fired from an Israeli military post near Rafah.
Soldiers suspected the bag of containing explosives, though it was later found to hold only schoolbooks. The Israel Defence Forces announced it would investigate the death.
In one of the latest deaths, a 15-year-old youth shot near Jabaliya yesterday died of his wounds.
Palestinian and Israeli sources spoke yesterday of preliminary talks to bring an end to the current spike in violence, which was triggered by the deaths last Wednesday of two Israeli preschoolers aged 2 and 4 as they were struck by a homemade Qassam rocket in the Israeli border town of Sderot.
The Israeli military response, the biggest incursion into Gaza in years, has focused on the militant hotbed of Jabaliya, the largest of all Palestinian refugee camps.
A tour of the camp yesterday revealed streets so black they appeared freshly paved; but what seemed new asphalt was in fact the fallout of soot from tires set alight almost continuously in a bid by militants to throw off the sensors of Israeli reconnaissance drones watching in real-time video from high overhead.
Amid the funerals, life continues. The town's open-air market has spontaneously sprung up further west of its usual location in order to avoid the sightlines of Israeli positions on the eastern edges of Jabaliya.
At Sheikh Adwan Hospital, Jabaliya's 43-bed facility, Dr. Husam Ibrahim, 34, described an onslaught with personal dimensions. Yesterday marked a week of almost continuous duty at the intensive care unit for the Russian-trained surgeon, and in that time he has lost three cousins.
"Sabri was 13, he died of a bullet to the heart. Wafi was 27, he was standing near a wall when he was hit by shrapnel from a tank shell," said Ibrahim, who maintained both were innocent bystanders.
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of another man, carrying a disembodied human leg in a white plastic bag. The whereabouts and identity of the limb's owner was not known. The man who discovered it didn't know what else to do but deliver it here.
Barely fazed by the interruption, the doctor spoke of his third dead cousin, Ibrahim Asaliya, 39. Unlike the others, this one was a militant, he said.
"He was hit by the tank shell at the school, but there was still life in his body when he was brought here," Ibrahim said, dragging deeply on an L&M cigarette.
"I looked at his face and saw my cousin. And he died in my arms."
At the United Nations in New York, the United States vetoed an Arab-backed resolution demanding an immediate end to Israeli military operations in Gaza. The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 11 in favour and one against, with Britain, Germany and Romania abstaining, Associated Press reported
Jewish Peace News Editors:
Judith Norman
Alistair Welchman
Mitchell Plitnick
Lincoln Shlensky
Ami Kronfeld
Rela Mazali
Sarah Anne Minkin
John Wilner
Joel Beinin
In essence, the unilateral Gaza withdrawal plan accomplishes two things. One, thanks to the remarkable naiveté and short-sightedness of the Bush administration, the plan won for Sharon an American promise that Israel would keep some part of the West Bank at the least (and also would not have to negotiate with the Palestinians over the claims of refugees wishing to return to their former homeland). Second, and more important, it caused the complete cessation of any kind of peace process.
Whatever one's estimation of the political processes that had been going on between Israel and the Palestinians for the past 13 years, the terms of any peace, even the most one-sided kind for Israel, would certainly have had to mean some concession on the main issues of refugees, Jerusalem and the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Now, with US backing, with Israel taking unilateral actions, with an impotent Palestinian Authority and groups like Hamas supplying the impetus for Israeli military incursions, there need be no political process.
What Sharon has always feared is a political settlement, because any political settlement would have to mean major settlement losses on the West Bank and some kind of Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem. Such is what would have occurred even under the ridiculously lopsided offers made by Barak to Arafat and under the somewhat less one-sided Geneva Initiative. But even this is anathema to Sharon. Yet his Gaza withdrawal plan has drawn intense criticism from the hard right wing in Israel. Weisglass' interview is likely aimed at dispelling at least some, if not most, of that right-wing wrath.
If Weisglass' words reached more people, especially Jews, it would surely prove that Ariel Sharon's efforts are not geared toward protecting the lives of Israeli Jews, much less toward peace, even on very favorable terms to Israel. As long as he can see a way to avoid any compromise at all, he will pursue it. If the Israeli lives he is sacrificing to his myopic ideology do not sway him, we can rest assured that the far greater number of Palestinian lives that his brutal and greedy policies will cost will not faze him one iota. – MP]
Top PM aide: Gaza plan aims to freeze the peace process
By Ari Shavit, Haaretz Correspondent
http://ga3.org/ct/07aCgtM1zBCM/
"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser Dov Weisglass told Haaretz, in an interview for the Friday Magazine.
Weisglass, who was one of the initiators of the disengagement plan, added, "And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."
"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," he said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
Asked why the disengagement plan had been hatched, Weisglass replied: "Because in the fall of 2003 we understood that everything was stuck. And although by the way the Americans read the situation, the blame fell on the Palestinians, not on us, Arik [Sharon] grasped that this state of affairs could not last, that they wouldn't leave us alone, wouldn't get off our case. Time was not on our side. There was international erosion, internal erosion. Domestically, in the meantime, everything was collapsing. The economy was stagnant, and the Geneva Initiative had gained broad support. And then we were hit with the letters of officers and letters of pilots and letters of commandos [refusing to serve in the territories]. These were not weird kids with green ponytails and a ring in their nose with a strong odor of grass. These were people like Spector's group [Yiftah Spector, a renowned Air Force pilot who signed the pilot's letter]. Really our finest young people."
Weisglass does not deny that the main achievement of the Gaza plan is the freezing of the peace process in a "legitimate manner."
"That is exactly what happened," he said. "You know, the term `peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
Sharon, he said, could also argue "honestly" that the disengagement plan was "a serious move because of which, out of 240,000 settlers, 190,000 will not be moved from their place."
The full interview will appear on Friday.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[JPN Commentary: It seems almost redundant, or at least perfunctory, to report that the United States has once again used its veto power to block a UN Security Council resolution. This one would have called on Israel to end its current invasion of Gaza.
The US and Israel insist that a resolution on this matter must be "balanced" yet they also rejected a version that Russia tried to put together, which would have equally condemned Hamas for launching the horrid missile attack against the town of Sderot inside Israel proper which took the lives of two Israeli children, aged 4 and 2. Apparently Israel and the US have a unique definition of "balance" which means that the UN can only act against one side, the Palestinians. With the death toll in Israel's Gaza invasion climbing over 80 and the injured in the hundreds, including many civilians and children, the Israeli characterization of the UN resolution as blaming the victim (i.e. Israel) is simply appalling. – MP]
U.S. vetoes UN resolution demanding end to Gaza offensive
By Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service and Agencies
http://ga3.org/ct/0daCgtM1zBCA/
NEW YORK - The United States on Tuesday vetoed a United Nations Security Council draft resolution demanding that Israel stop a major offensive in the Gaza Strip that has cost at least 80 Palestinian lives.
A total of 11 nations voted in favor. Britain, Germany and Romania abstained on the measure drafted by Arab nations.
Arab nations demanded in a draft UN Security Council resolution Monday that Israel immediately halt its incursion into northern Gaza.
The draft resolution, submitted to the council in an emergency meeting convened at the request of Arab nations on Monday, calls for an immediate halt to the offensive and calls on Israel and the Palestinians to immediately implement the internationally-backed road map peace plan.
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Dan Gillerman expressed his happiness after the vote and said that the resolution only condemned the victim and not the attacker.
Gillerman added that the nations which abstained showed courage while those that voted in favor were cowards.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Danforth cast the U.S. veto after British and German efforts to find compromise language failed.
"Once again, the resolution is lopsided and unbalanced," Danforth told the council just before voting "no."
"It is dangerously disingenuous because of its many material omissions. Because of this lack of balance, because of these omissions the resolution lacks credibility and deserves a 'no' vote," he said.
After the vote, Algeria's UN Ambassador Abdallah Baali, the only Arab member of the council, thanked the resolution's supporters and noted that the measure got more than the minimum nine "yes" votes needed for adoption absent a veto by one of the five permanent council members.
"It is a sad day for the Palestinians and it is a sad day for justice," Baali said.
The U.S. had earlier on Tuesday rejected a Russian-sponsored compromise to balance a UN Security Council condemnation of Israel for its operation in the Gaza Strip with a condemnation of Hamas for firing Qassam rockets at the western Negev town of Sderot.
Danforth had said Monday that if the resolution was passed "it would be a very terrible statement for the Security Council to make" because he said it acquiesces in terror against Israelis.
Shalom holding talks with European counterparts
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom on Tuesday held a series of talks with his European counterparts in an effort to prevent a unilateral condemnation of Israel.
Shalom met with foreign ministers from the Netherlands, Russia and Great Britain. He asked them to oppose any resolution that does not also condemn Qassam rocket attacks on Israel.
The European ministers said they condemn the attacks on Israel, but expect Israel to respond to them in a manner proportional to the Qassam threat.
Baali, the only Arab member of the council, requested the open meeting following the nearly weeklong Israeli offensive - the largest of its kind launched by Israel in four years in Gaza.
"Taking into account the gravity, the urgency of the situation, the seriousness of the situation, we need to have the Security Council take a decision quickly - and quickly means Tuesday at the latest," Baali said.
Gillerman, referring to the Security Council debate, said Monday that, "In the past, as well, the Americans have not allowed one-sided resolutions to pass. They understand that our activity is a response to Qassams, they understand that Israel has the right to self-defense."
The United States hopes Israel will quickly end its massive offensive in Gaza without expanding the operation, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Monday.
"I hope it does not expand and I hope whatever he does is proportionate to the threat that Israel is facing and I hope that this operation can come to a conclusion quickly," Powell told reporters aboard his plane as he flew to Brazil.
Powell said he could not judge if Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had overreacted and predicted the Israeli leader would end the offensive only when he perceived he had dealt with the threat from Palestinian rockets
Sharon's offensive "is not in contrast to the disengagement plan. He remains as committed to the disengagement plan and hopefully that will get on track," Powell said.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[JPN Commentary: This report gives an overview of the state of affairs under Israel's invasion. Little comment necessary, but it is worthwhile to make a special note of one case: that of a 13-year old Palestinian girl who was killed for going to school and, horror of horrors, carrying her schollbooks with her, which, naturally since she is Palestinian, the Israeli soldiers said they thought were a bomb.
For JVP's official statement on the Gaza invasion, click here. – MP]
Body count grows in besieged Gaza camp
by Mitch Potter, Toronto Star Mideast Bureau
http://ga3.org/ct/p1aCgtM1zBC2/
JABALIYA, Gaza Strip—The harvest of death in this most dispossessed of refugee camps continued yesterday as the Israeli army finished its first week in a grim, open-ended manhunt for Palestinian militants, killing 10 people and wounding at least nine.
With a body count of more than 80 Palestinians and three Israelis since operation "Days of Penitence" arrived in the northern Gaza Strip involving an estimated 200 tanks and 2,000 troops, the toll shows everywhere.
Street by narrow street, the 106,000 Palestinian refugees of Jabaliya are in an almost continuous state of mourning, as family and friends circulate among makeshift funeral tents throughout the squalid cinderblock camp, paying condolences under banners bearing the colours of Hamas, Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and Islamic Jihad, among others.
Today's festival of sorrow will include the funeral of Bashir al-Dabash, 38, overall military commander of Islamic Jihad and by far the highest-profile Gaza militant to fall under Israeli crosshairs since the assassination of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi last April.
Dabash and his bodyguard died at sunset yesterday when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile into the white Subaru they were driving near Gaza City's main hospital.
The missile made a piercing whistle just before exploding with a resounding boom that echoed through Gaza.
The Israeli army later released a statement acknowledging the attack, saying Dabash was responsible for dozens of attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers.
A second Israeli missile landed later last night in the heart of Jabaliya with a muffled thump, killing two militants wearing the colours of Al Aqsa and wounded eight others, a blend of fighters and civilians, according to Palestinian medical sources.
News wire services reported Israeli tank fire killed three Palestinians and wounded 10 children in the northern Gaza Strip early today. Medics told Reuters that tank shells killed a 15-year-old Palestinian in one house and two men in another before dawn in the besieged town of Beit Lahiya. Another shell hit a house where a family was sleeping, wounding 10 children, the youngest just six months old.
Among others killed in Gaza yesterday was a 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl, Iman Al Hams, her body riddled with as many as 20 bullets when she dropped her bag and ran after hearing a warning shot fired from an Israeli military post near Rafah.
Soldiers suspected the bag of containing explosives, though it was later found to hold only schoolbooks. The Israel Defence Forces announced it would investigate the death.
In one of the latest deaths, a 15-year-old youth shot near Jabaliya yesterday died of his wounds.
Palestinian and Israeli sources spoke yesterday of preliminary talks to bring an end to the current spike in violence, which was triggered by the deaths last Wednesday of two Israeli preschoolers aged 2 and 4 as they were struck by a homemade Qassam rocket in the Israeli border town of Sderot.
The Israeli military response, the biggest incursion into Gaza in years, has focused on the militant hotbed of Jabaliya, the largest of all Palestinian refugee camps.
A tour of the camp yesterday revealed streets so black they appeared freshly paved; but what seemed new asphalt was in fact the fallout of soot from tires set alight almost continuously in a bid by militants to throw off the sensors of Israeli reconnaissance drones watching in real-time video from high overhead.
Amid the funerals, life continues. The town's open-air market has spontaneously sprung up further west of its usual location in order to avoid the sightlines of Israeli positions on the eastern edges of Jabaliya.
At Sheikh Adwan Hospital, Jabaliya's 43-bed facility, Dr. Husam Ibrahim, 34, described an onslaught with personal dimensions. Yesterday marked a week of almost continuous duty at the intensive care unit for the Russian-trained surgeon, and in that time he has lost three cousins.
"Sabri was 13, he died of a bullet to the heart. Wafi was 27, he was standing near a wall when he was hit by shrapnel from a tank shell," said Ibrahim, who maintained both were innocent bystanders.
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of another man, carrying a disembodied human leg in a white plastic bag. The whereabouts and identity of the limb's owner was not known. The man who discovered it didn't know what else to do but deliver it here.
Barely fazed by the interruption, the doctor spoke of his third dead cousin, Ibrahim Asaliya, 39. Unlike the others, this one was a militant, he said.
"He was hit by the tank shell at the school, but there was still life in his body when he was brought here," Ibrahim said, dragging deeply on an L&M cigarette.
"I looked at his face and saw my cousin. And he died in my arms."
At the United Nations in New York, the United States vetoed an Arab-backed resolution demanding an immediate end to Israeli military operations in Gaza. The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 11 in favour and one against, with Britain, Germany and Romania abstaining, Associated Press reported
Jewish Peace News Editors:
Judith Norman
Alistair Welchman
Mitchell Plitnick
Lincoln Shlensky
Ami Kronfeld
Rela Mazali
Sarah Anne Minkin
John Wilner
Joel Beinin
posted by R7 | 10/06/2004 08:58:00 AM
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