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News :: Miscellaneous
Israel Diary: 30 July, 2002	Current rating: 0
by InDepthNews Email: InDepthNews (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified!)	31 Jul 2002 Modified: 01 Aug 2002
As reported in Ha'aretz: 3 killed, 7 wounded, 9 arrests - Residents of Nablus defy IDF curfew - Propaganda machine covers up destroyed peace initiative - Peace initiative, drawn up before assassination, is revealed - Israeli army officer eye-witness calls Hebron riots a pogrom - Settlers contribute to "cycle of hatred and violence" - Rights group urges Israel to release 5 jailed Palestinian reporters
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Casualties, Events and background stories dealing with the Palestine-Israel conflict and occupation as reported in Ha�aretz. Tariq Ali has said, if you want to know about Israel, just read an Israeli newspaper. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tuesday, July 29, 2002 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ha'aretz Five people were wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up at around 1 P.M. Tuesday at the "Yemenite Felafel Stand" on Hanevi'im Street in downtown Jerusalem. One of the wounded is in moderate condition, the rest were said to have sustained light injuries. Israel Radio identified the bomber as 17-year-old Majed Atta, from the West Bank town of Beit Jala. Shin Bet Chief Avi Dichter warned at a Knesset Foreign Affair and Defense Committee meeting on Tuesday of an expected wave of suicide bombing attacks in the near future. He noted that in the past week the Shin Bet succeeded in thwarting twelve attacks that were to have taken place in Israel, and said that the Shin Bet had warnings of an additional sixty suicide bombings. Ha'aretz Two Israelis were killed by Palestinian gunmen earlier in the day in the West Bank village of Jama'in, close to the settlement of Ariel. Shlomo Odesar, 60, and his brother Mordechai, 52, from the settlement of Tapuah, were apparently killed while selling diesel oil to a cement factory in the village. The two were shot by masked men hiding behind olive trees in the area. "It appears that two of our residents entered a Palestinian village, perhaps to collect or offload merchandise, and were shot and murdered," said the secretary of the settlement of Tapuah, where the two murdered men resided. Jewish settlers have frequently been targeted since the start of the intifada in September 2000. While settlers constitute some 3 percent of the population, they make up 20 percent of all Israeli fatalities since the start of the uprising. The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack. Earlier Tuesday, two residents of the West Bank settlement of Itamar, a married couple, were wounded overnight Monday when a suspected Palestinian militant entered their home, Israel Radio reported Tuesday. The attacker was killed by security forces. The man sustained moderate injuries and his wife light wounds when they were stabbed by the Palestinian after he entered their bedroom at around 3 A.M. while they were sleeping, armed with two knives. The husband was stabbed in his hand and chest. An IDF soldier and an officer from the settlement's security force quickly arrived at the scene and killed the Palestinian. A Fatah man was arrested in Yatta as a suspect in the ambush that killed four Israelis at the Ziff junction on Friday. Another six Palestinians were arrested in the West Bank - a Hamas man in Hebron, and people from Nablus and Tul Karm. An army unit yesterday foiled an attempted bombing near the settlement of Nisanit in the Gaza Strip. It came across four anti-tank missile launchers and a mannequin dressed in camouflage uniform connected to a 50-kilogram bomb. The army believes the booby-trapped mannequin was meant to decoy an army patrol into thinking it was a terrorist. Security forces arrested two suspected Palestinian suicide bombers late Monday night and early Tuesday morning. IDF troops and Border Police officers had been searching both sides of the seam line, near the town of Matan, since early Monday afternoon, after a Palestinian dressed in an IDF uniform and carrying a bag was spotted near the town. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ha'aretz Ha'aretz2 Residents of Nablus defy IDF curfew. Residents in the northern West Bank city of Nablus defied the curfew imposed by the IDF for a third consecutive day Tuesday. The army has imposed the curfew in most West Bank cities and towns for 40 days and remained in armored vehicles ringing the city. Troops did not enter Nablus and made no attempt to drive residents off the streets and send them home. At the edge of the city, troops allowed trucks with supplies to enter but blocked passenger cars. Some Palestinians said troops were firing in the air over cars to turn away those approaching the city limits. Many Nablus people rushed to the markets yesterday, stocking up on fruit and vegetables and other necessities. The city appeared to be almost as busy as on typical days before the curfews. Standing at his felafel stand, Tamer Adnan said he was working despite the risk because he and his family had run out of food. "I've been confined to my home for more than a month. I have eight children, we've eaten all we have," Adnan said. "We need food and we must break any order to get our food. I resumed working not to fight Israel or its army, I'm just fighting to get food for my kids." In some cities, the curfew is often lifted during the day, and then reimposed before nightfall. However, the curfew has been particularly tight in Nablus. The city's 220,000 inhabitants have been confined to their homes for 42 days, during which they have been allowed out only five times, a spokeswoman for the Nablus governor, Suheir Zorba, said. The IDF has not lifted the curfew for the past ten days, but people have been challenging it for three days, going out into the streets and opening their stores, she said, citing severe shortages in supplies and food, such as baby milk. "Nablus is a commercial city. It depends on trading. The curfew increased poverty greatly. Many people do not have food, especially in the Old City and in the camps. There is a shortage of medicine and health equipment in the hospitals. The education sector is affected badly". University exams had been postponed by 40 days from June 21 to early August. About 1,900 pupils in their final year of high school had finished their matriculation exams despite the curfew three days ago. Ayman Shaka'a, a Nablus municipality official, said that despite the curfew, crime was continuing in the city, but the police had been unable to function. The fire brigade was the only municipal service allowed by the army to operate, and it had been forced to take over some of the policing functions in the city, the official explained. An IDF spokesman said the army was aware of the curfew violations, but declined to say whether it intended to enforce it. He said the curfew was not lifted because of "intelligence information" about possible attacks on Israelis launched from the city. "We try to lift the curfew where we can," he said. The army on Tuesday allowed people allowed out of their homes in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm and Hebron for five to 12 hours, while in Kalkilya the curfew was lifted until further notice. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ha'aretz Propaganda machine covers up destroyed peace initiative. Israel's propaganda machine worked overtime this week and proved its efficacy. The prime minister, the foreign minister, intelligence officers, officials and spokesmen changed overnight from a fight for a cease-fire to a fight against a cease-fire initiative. For many months, they told the entire world that it's a waste of paper to reach a cease-fire with the Palestinian Authority, explaining that Tanzim and Fatah leaders are in control of the street, along with Hamas. They claimed that with one hand, PA Chairman Yasser Arafat signs condemnations of terror and with the other signs fat checks that he shoves into the pockets of the terrorists. Some backed their claims by saying that even Alistair Crooke, the head of the EU security team in the territories whose integrity and professionalism is unassailable, says that there's no value to a cease-fire that doesn't include at least the Tanzim. But when a unilateral declaration for a cease-fire, an initiative that rose from the deepest of the grassroots of the Tanzim and Fatah, was presented to them, everyone made a mockery of it. They weren't impressed by Arafat and his associates jumping on the bandwagon driven by Fatah's Hussein a Sheikh and his associates, because Arafat et al fear being shoved off the road by the young leadership. After we heard, unceasingly, that everything is under Arafat's thumb, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer announced to the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the cease-fire was initiated by local leaders, and that they have no influence over the terrorists. So, what should we understand from Crooke putting his personal and professional reputation on the cease-fire? Really, if we are to believe the Israeli government, how can we use European evidence, and from someone named Crooke? And we should also believe that we'd all understand that the entire matter of a cease-fire against all Israeli civilians is nothing more than a hollow lifesaver for Arafat. We ignorant laymen have to believe them, just as we're supposed to believe that nobody took into consideration that a ton of explosives dropped into a crowded residential neighborhood might end in a disaster. But since the "material" in this case is classified "top secret," there's no way to know whether Israeli intelligence, which knew of every step that Salah Shehadeh and his guests took, also knew that the Tanzim held a meeting last weekend with Hamas in which they discussed, among other things, sending Shehadeh away on a very long vacation. In other words, in discussions between EU representatives and Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas leader was told that it won't be enough for the political wing of the Hamas to join the agreement, the military wing also has to sign on. The agreement was that a declaration would be postponed until Hamas's military wing, based in Damascus, adopt Yassin's recommendation to sign the declaration. On Monday night, less than two hours before the bombing struck Shehadeh's neighborhood, the Palestinians and Europeans involved in the move believed the reaction would be positive. To create some facts on the ground, Yassin and his people gave interviews to the Arab press in which they offered a hudna, a truce, in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines. There were days when such statements would take over the front-page headlines of the press and result in a noisy debate in political and media circles in Israel. The possibility that the six Israelis shot dead by terrorists after the Gaza attack were victims of a vengeance attack by Palestinians for the death of the children in Gaza went ignored. The odd accusation by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon deliberately used the Shehadeh assassination to undermine the cease-fire also barely drew notice. Yossi Beilin, back this week from talks in Washington, says that the cease-fire attempt and the Gaza bombing were the talk of the town wherever he went - the National Security Council, the State Department and Congress. He says that he was asked if it was an accident that for a third time, Sharon ordered such an operation just as the chances for a cease-fire begin to take shape. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ha'aretz Peace initiative, drawn up before assassination, is revealed. The chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, MK Haim Ramon (Labor), revealed Monday a document in which Fatah activists announced their intention to declare a unilateral cease-fire. Ramon claimed that the document was drawn up in coordination with the European Union and U.S. President George W. Bush's administration, but that after last week's assassination of Hamas military leader Salah Shehadeh, Fatah decided to shelve the planned announcement. The authors of the English-language document - local leaders of the grass-roots Tanzim (activists) section of Fatah - vow that they "will do everything in our power to end attacks on Israeli civilians, on innocent men, women and children." The activists emphasized that they would "do this without seeking or demanding any prior gains." In the document, the Tanzim also say that they would try and persuade other armed Palestinian groups to follow their example, and would police their towns to ensure that the cease-fire was maintained. The activists reserved the right, however, to continue their armed struggle against the IDF and "the occupation of our lands and cities, your building of settlements, your house demolitions, your plan to deport our people." Ramon said that this was the first proof that a cease-fire proposal existed, and that until the discovery of this document, there only had been reports of negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas officials prior to Shehadeh's assassination, and not with a grass-root organization of Tanzim members. Ramon claimed that the IDF's intelligence division did not pass on reports about the planned declaration since it did not consider them reliable. Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer replied that he had known of the Tanzim intention, but clarified that those involved in the plan were political activists in the organization and not people in the field. He added that any attempt to claim that the hit on Shehadeh dashed any hopes of an imminent agreement among Palestinian groups was untrue, since no such agreement had been reached. In any case, he added, Shehadeh had not been a party in the talks. Ben-Eliezer also said the air force had previously dropped 47 one-ton bombs - the same size that killed Shehadeh - during West Bank operations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ha'aretz Israeli army officer eye-witness calls Hebron riots a pogrom. Col. (res.) Moshe Givati, an adviser on settlement security for Public Security Minister Uzi Landau, yesterday termed the rioting that took place during the funeral of Elazar Leibowitz, "a pogrom against the Arabs of Hebron, with no provocation on the Palestinian side." Givati, who attended the funeral on Sunday, said he witnessed "brutal acts" and rejected absolutely explanations by the Jewish Community of Hebron Council spokesmen who said they were acting in self-defense against Palestinian stone-throwing. Givati, who was commander of the Hebron brigade during the first intifada, has good relations with the settlement movement leadership. He was appointed six months ago by Landau to help smooth relations between the police and the settlement community. Most of his efforts are in Hebron, where relations between the police and the settlers are particularly strained. Givati was in Hebron on Saturday night, in advance of the funeral for Leibowitz, an army first sergeant killed in a Palestinian ambush on Friday outside the city. The violence began already on Saturday night, he says, when a group of Jewish youths invaded a Palestinian house in the city, and burned and vandalized the possessions inside. Police and Border Patrol called to the scene arrested three of the youths, who included Leibowitz's brothers. They were released a few hours later. Givati says the police and army deployed properly for the funeral, but at the request of the settlers, the police maintained a low profile, letting the other security forces - Israel Defense Forces troops - provide security for the funeral procession. The violence began after the takeover of the podium where eulogies were being given in the garden outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs by a group of youths, many of them friends of the Hebron-born Leibowitz. They began calling for revenge. "At most, and I even doubt that, a small rock was thrown from the direction of the Palestinian houses. And that was enough. It was the signal for the thugs to charge," Givati said. He said that "the Palestinians did not throw any rocks or boulders at the funeral procession. There were 20 or 30 people, who were mostly not from Hebron," he said. He said he suspects most are from the outposts in the area of Itamar and Yitzhar. "For some reason they were all carrying army-issue weapons, and they charged into the Palestinian houses. "That's when the fracas began. I saw everything from very close range. There were long bursts of fire by the Israelis - into the air and at the houses." It was during that fire that 14-year-old Nibin Jamjum was killed by a bullet to her head, and a Palestinian boy was stabbed. IDF sources say that these two and the other wounded - 15 Palestinians in all were reported wounded, and an equal number of police were hurt - were casualties of the Jewish violence. "Dozens of thugs, including youths from Hebron, burst into Arab houses for no reason. They broke windows, destoryed property and threw stones. These people were there for the purpose of making a pogrom," said Givati. Soldiers, police and Border Patrol troops who arrived on the scene tried to arrest the rioters, but were attacked. "Police officers were beaten," Givati said. "I am an alumnus of the first intifada and I never saw anything like this. A dozen thugs knocked down a policeman and kicked at him." The police arrested some of the rioters, but the police car carrying them out was blocked by their friends, who damaged the police car. Boys and girls from Hebron kept up a stream of curses at the soldiers. They were called "Amalek's soldiers," and warned, "you're next." Givati believes the police and army "were too restrained. Considering the events, much more force should have been used. We cannot allow such harm to the rule of law. It's inconceivable that soldiers and police be cursed that way." He said that settlement leaders from outside the Hebron area were also shocked by the level of violence displayed by the settlers in Hebron. The police said yesterday that the Palestinian Authority police force is way of cooperating with an Israeli investigation into the rioting and the death of the Palestinian girl. Two of the girl's brothers were also wounded by gunfire, apparently when they tried to rescue their sister. The police say the PA police have so far rejected handing over medical forensic information from the wounded, which the police want to use to help identify assailants. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ha'aretz Settlers contribute to "cycle of hatred and violence". Once again it became evident to all how extremists among the settlers contribute to the cycle of hatred and violence. The violence in Hebron is proof of just how impossible it is to maintain a state of coexistence between settlers and Palestinians in the occupied territories and just how great a role the extremists play in exacerbating the conflict. The settlements are a burden on the Israeli explanation for why it holds the territories - for security and as a bargaining card - and a burden on the efforts to make peace. The settlers claim that they were sent by Israeli governments, some of which were explicit in their encouragement, while others turned a blind eye to the settlement growth. But the settler leaders also say they do not have to obey a contrary policy of evacuating the territories beyond the Green Line, if that is what a government were to decide. Israel uses strong words when it comes to the Palestinians about the need for a central government to impose discipline on individuals and organizations, to impose law and order, to repress violence and for equal treatment for all. But that is all empty rhetoric when it comes to settlers. Israeli governments, even when the prime minister or defense minister have been from the Labor Party, surrender to the settlers and cooperate with them. The problem is particularly acute - and chronic - when it comes to the Jewish enclave in the heart of Hebron, where the settlers continue, at will, to make a mockery of the security forces. They see that the Shin Bet, which excels at preventing terrorist outrages, has not managed to put its hands on Israelis who attacked Palestinians; that Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer makes empty promises about removing wildcat outposts; that the court treats settlers with kid gloves. They see this and draw their conclusions - and so do the Palestinians. Israel's institutions and its government structure are stronger than the Palestinian Authority's. What it demands of Yasser Arafat, it must first demand of itself. The failures of the government, army and police are worrisome, lest they won't have the strength to act decisively against the settlers when an agreement is reached with the Palestinians, just as Yitzhak Rabin was deterred from evacuating a handful of extremists out of Tel Rumeida after the Baruch Goldstein massacre in the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The obvious conclusion - that the settlers must be removed from Hebron - has never even come up for discussion. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ha'aretz Rights group urges Israel to release 5 jailed Palestinian reporters. Paris-based press watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) called on the Israeli government on Tuesday to free five jailed Palestinian journalists, including Reuters cameraman Jussry al-Jamal. "The arrest of these five journalists was completely arbitrary," RSF quoted its secretary-general Robert Menard as writing in a letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "The authorities say two of them helped terrorist organizations, but they have offered no proof of this. The three others have not even been told why they are being held." The five journalists are Jamal; Agence France Presse photographer Hussam Abu Alan; Khalid Ali Mohammed Zwawi of the Gaza-based Palestinian weekly El Istiqlal, Kamel Ali Jbeil of the East Jerusalem daily Palestinian Al-Quds; and Nizar Ramadan, of the Qater newspaper. The Israel Defense Forces has told Reuters that Jamal was detained "on suspicion of aiding a terror organization" but the Israeli authorities have provided no details since then, ignoring repeated demands for his release by Reuters. Some of the five have now been imprisoned for more than three months in very poor conditions, RSF said in a statement. Troops detained Jamal, 23, in the West Bank city of Hebron on the afternoon of April 30 as he filmed outside a hospital. AFP's Alan was arrested on April 24 at the Beit Anun checkpoint near Hebron on his way to cover the funeral of two Palestinians. Zwawi was arrested in the middle of the night at his home in Nablus by Israeli soldiers who searched his house and seized material, it said. The IDF and government have come under increasing pressure over their handling of the Palestinian and international media since Palestinians rose up against Israeli occupation in September 2000. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based rights group, last week urged the army to probe the killing of a Palestinian photographer and all cases in which soldiers have shot and wounded journalists in 22 months of conflict. *%&#@!

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About Ha'aretz
by gehrig (No verified email address)	Current rating: 0 31 Jul 2002
For what it's worth, the Haaretz site I quote from is at www.haaretzdaily.com. The site itself is careful to distinguish commentary from news; I wish I could say the same about the summary above. Ha'aretz is, incidentally, a leftist paper; the rightist counterpart is the Jerusalem Post (www.jpost.com) if you want the full spectral experience. @%<