17/03/2004

Palestine Media Center – PMC

In an encouragement for further Israeli aggressions against the Palestinian people, the Bush Administration has sided with Israel in its ongoing attacks launched by US-made warplanes on the Gaza Strip, which has so far claimed six Palestinian lives, including two children, in less than 24 hours, wounded dozens more and rendered at least seven houses and a university faculty building completely demolished by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).

A US State Department spokesman said late Tuesday that Israel has “the right to defend itself”, but added that Israeli authorities should be sensitive to the consequences of its military actions.

The spokesman faulted President Yaser Arafat, besieged in his Ramallah compound since December 2001, for failing to act against Palestinian activists, calling it “a glaring failure” on his part.

Two children were killed early Wednesday by sporadic IOF machine gunfire in Rafah.

Earlier, Farah Abu Jazar, 22, and an elderly man identified as Mahmoud Abu Nahel were killed and several others injured, three of them critically, when IOF troops, backed by tanks and military bulldozers, stormed into Rafah and the nearby refugee camps, and demolished seven houses in the southern Gaza Strip town overnight Wednesday.

Five of the houses were owned by Yusuf and Sulaiman Abu Taha, Mohammad Yusuf Abu Taha, Mohammad Saeed Abu Taha and the martyr Mahmud Abu Nahel.

IOF troops stormed into Brazil neighborhood of Rafah late Tuesday in an ongoing invasion.

Twenty-five Israeli tanks, jeeps and bulldozers invaded the Rafah refugee camp about 2 a.m. Wednesday.

Early Wednesday an Israeli helicopter fired a missile in the camp.

In another invasion early Wednesday, IOF stormed east of Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, opening sporadic machine gunfire and bulldozing vast areas of Palestinian agricultural land.

Late Tuesday, US-made Israeli attack choppers fired missiles at a building and two cars in Gaza City on Tuesday, killing two Palestinians.

Bystanders Nasser Yasin, 27, and Hosni Juma’a al-Sarafati, 44, were killed, apparently in a failed IOF extra-judicial assassination that targeted Mohammad Al-Kharroubi’s house, reportedly an Islamic Jihad leading activist against the 37-year-old Israeli occupation.

Both bodies were badly burned, witnesses at the local morgue said.

One of the two killed was a police officer returning home from work, witnesses and hospital officials said.

Bilal Wadif, 22, was walking by when he saw three missiles hit the building. Wadif ran into the burning house to help pull out the injured, he said minutes later at the hospital, his pants stained with blood.

At least 14 Palestinian bystanders were wounded, including four children, one of them aged 3 and a 2-year-old girl.

The missiles destroyed the one-story house and cars in the Nasser neighborhood north of Gaza City.

An IOF statement claimed the house a “structure where Islamic Jihad terrorists involved in attacks on Israelis were present.”

Islamic Jihad officials confirmed the main target was the area commander Mohammed Al-Kharoubi, who survived the failed extra-judicial execution, they said.

Earlier in the day, IOF troops demolished the two-story and 40-classroom building of the Education Faculty of Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City.

Throughout the day Tuesday, IOF tanks were seen mobilizing around the volatile coastal strip, while Palestinians lined up at bakeries and groceries to stock up on food in case of new Israeli assaults, wires reported.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon convened his security cabinet on Tuesday for the first time in six months, while his IOF troops poised on the Gaza border as his lieutenants threatened to unleash unprecedented military might on the Strip and announced plans to “target” Palestinian political leaders.

Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat denounced the airstrike on Gaza.

“What’s needed to break the vicious cycle of violence is not the mentality of revenge but mentality of reconciliation and negotiations,” he told The Associated Press.

Erekat said Israel’s new military escalation would only perpetuate the cycle of violence.

“At the same time that Sharon freezes negotiations, he unleashes missiles and tanks still believing that the problem can be solved through military solutions,” he told Reuters.

“We call on him to return to negotiations, because only this will lead to an end to the cycle of violence.”

Meanwhile, an annual poll conducted by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and released Sunday found a majority of the Jewish population in Israel supports PM Sharon’s plans for unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Separately, a 24-year-old Palestinian, who is a native of the northern West Bank town of Qalqilyah, was critically wounded on Tuesday evening after an Israeli civilian police volunteer opened fire at him in Tel Aviv, Haaretz reported.

In the West Bank on Wednesday, IOF demolished the houses of Hasan Awwad Abu Kharma in the Tulkarem refugee camp and Tayyeb Ali Faraj in the village of Madama southwest of Nablus, in the northern West Bank.