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Three Hamas activists and bystander killed in Israeli raid
Khaleej Times, (AP), 27 June 2003
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Israeli soldiers raided two homes on Friday, killing three Palestinians and a bystander in a firefight and undercutting efforts by Palestinian leaders to wrap up a deal with armed groups on a three-month suspension of attacks on Israelis. In the two-hour battle, soldiers blew up a house and fired more than a dozen tank shells, as combat helicopters fired machine guns toward groups of dozens of gunmen.
The target of the raid, Adnan al-Ghoul, also known as “The Engineer,” was not present. Yet, Israeli soldiers killed other family members.
However, there were signs that the raid would not scuttle the truce announcement. Hamas’ reaction was relatively muted, and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas said that “all the factions are studying how to finalize the agreement.”
Also on Friday, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the terms of an Israeli troop pullback in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Bethlehem - in line with a US-backed peace plan - yielded “real progress” on Friday, a Palestinian official said.
Negotiators resolved the key sticking point, control over the main north-south road in Gaza, and another meeting was scheduled for later Friday to conclude a deal, the official said.
A troop pullback would be the first major step by Israel toward implementing the peace plan, which calls on Israel to return to positions it held before the outbreak of fighting in September 2000. The plan also requires Palestinian security forces to dismantle militias, but Palestinian leaders have said they will not launch a crackdown.
An Israeli pullback, coupled with a promise by Palestinian resistance groups to halt attacks on Israelis for three months, could be a major boost for Washington’s peace initiative, the “road map” to Palestinian statehood by 2005. The plan was launched by US President George W. Bush on June 4, but implementation has been halting until now.
Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser, is to arrive in the region on Saturday, as Bush’s personal envoy, to talk to the Palestinian and Israeli prime ministers about the plan.
En route to the Middle East, Rice called on the European Union to outlaw the political wing of Hamas to dry up the flow of donations to the group, but Rice and other members of the Bush administration never contemplated punishing Israel or stopping financial and military aid to its oppressive government.
Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader, suggested Friday that despite the Israeli raid, the truce talks were still on. “A plan for a truce ... will be announced along with other Palestinian factions at the right time,” he told Lebanon’s Al Hayat-LBC satellite television from Gaza. “Until this happens, the resistance and confrontation will continue.”
Hamas’ military wing issued a statement blaming the United States for the Israeli strikes, but refrained for the first time from making customary threats of more attacks against Israel.
The Damascus-based leaders of the groups, Khaled Mashal of Hamas and Ramadan Shalah of Islamic Jihad, had agreed to a suspension of attacks earlier this week, but a formal announcement has been delayed until the weekend to add final touches.
Israel has shrugged off the emerging truce as an internal Palestinian matter, and has said the hunt for militants would not cease. “Such operations will continue until we have a cease-fire,” said Avi Pazner, an Israeli government spokesman. “If and when the cease-fire will be put into effect, then we will look again at that kind of (operation).”
Other Israeli officials have said that even if a truce is declared, Israel would still go after militants it felt were threatening its security.
In Friday’s raid, undercover troops surrounded the home of Omran al-Ghoul, a brother of the Hamas bombmaker and himself an operative of the group, in the village of Mughraqa in the central Gaza Strip.
A gunbattle erupted between soldiers and dozens of armed Palestinians, and Omran al-Ghoul and the bombmaker’s son, Mohammed, 19, were killed. In a separate clash nearby, a bystander and another gunmen were killed, Palestinian hospital officials said. Palestinian witnesses said they heard 17 tank shells being shot during the battles, and said helicopters fired incessantly.
The Israeli operation came as Palestinian groups were working on a cease-fire declaration after agreeing to a temporary halt to attacks.
The agreement for a three-month truce was worked out between Marwan Barghouti, West Bank leader of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, and heads of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Damascus. Mashal, the Hamas leader, then drafted the deal based on his discussions with Barghouti.
Barghouti is in an Israeli prison, held while on trial for alleged complicity in Palestinian attacks that killed 26 Israelis.
Negotiators said the truce would halt attacks by the three groups for three months and would apply to the West Bank and Gaza as well as Israel, a key Israeli demand. In exchange they demanded an end to the assassination of Palestinians, Israeli air and land attacks, and the release of prisoners; however, these were not made conditions for beginning the truce.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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