Israeli tanks and jeeps, backed overhead by attack helicopters, entered the Zeitoun neighborhood shortly after midnight, May 10, in a raid that Israeli military spokespeople said was aimed at the “terrorist infrastructure.” Residents mobilized to resist the invasion and a wide-ranging gun battle broke out. At about 6:30 a.m. May 11, an armored personnel carrier blew up when it struck a mine, killing six Israeli soldiers.

Claiming it was hunting for the dead soldiers’ remains, the Israeli army stepped up its assault. Troops rampaged from house to house as a large armored force entered the city. Buildings and homes were shelled from helicopters, tanks, and gunboats off the Gaza City seacoast.

During the two-day invasion, the Israeli forces targeted the entire population, destroying at least four multi-story buildings and dozens of homes and shops, and shelling the district’s main electrical generator, cutting off electricity. Army bulldozers dug up water mains and sewage pipes—flooding a one-mile stretch of Salah al Din Street, the main thoroughfare that runs through the neighborhood— and uprooted hundreds of olive trees in nearby groves.

“This is total destruction aimed at making our people kneel down,” said Palestinian Authority housing minister Abdel Rahman Hamad. “It is an act of terrorism.”

In the first 10 days of May, Israeli bulldozers and bombs destroyed some 131 residential buildings in the Gaza Strip, leaving 1,100 people homeless, reported the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in a press release issued the day before the Gaza City raid.

Describing this as “one of the most intense periods of destruction since the start of the intifada,” the report pointed out that the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip has been a particular focus of Israel’s assault. “Intifada”—or uprising—refers to the resistance by Palestinians in the occupied territories touched off in September 2000 by the provocative visit by Likud Party leader (and now prime minister) Ariel Sharon to a Muslim holy site in Jerusalem accompanied by at least 1,000 Israeli soldiers. The term originated with the first Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories that began in the late 1980s. Since September 2000, UNRWA reports, the Israeli army has destroyed the homes of 17,594 people in Gaza—11,215 of them in the Rafah camp alone.

Following a May 12 attack on an Israeli armored car near the Egyptian border that left five soldiers dead, the Rafah camp was again the focus of a Tel Aviv assault. Twelve of Rafah’s residents were killed when Israeli forces fired missiles May 13 in separate attacks from helicopter gunships into crowds of people in the camp.

The next day, Israeli bulldozers began demolishing rows of homes in the camp with the purported aim of widening the “buffer zone” that the Israeli army patrols along the border between Gaza and Egypt. “Carrying white flags and belongings, Palestinians in Rafah fled the path of armored bulldozers, which knocked down two clusters of five houses each in an initial assault and threatened many more structures,” reported a May 14 Reuters dispatch

Tel Aviv has promised to destroy hundreds more homes in the camp. Paul McCann, a UNRWA spokesman, said the destruction was causing “a humanitarian catastrophe.”

An Israeli army official told Reuters that laying flat a section of the densely populated refugee camp is “a measure we are taking…to reshape the theater of war so we will enjoy an advantage and not the Palestinians.”

The stepped-up offensive by Tel Aviv against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is part of the Israeli government’s preparation for implementing its so-called disengagement plan. The plan includes the withdrawal of the 7,500 Israeli settlers that currently occupy more than one-fifth of the Gaza Strip. Some 1.3 million Palestinians live in the remaining territory.

The plan aims to consolidate the Israeli government’s grip on territory in the West Bank that has been expropriated from the Palestinian population and is today home to the bulk of the 223,000 Israeli settlers there. The plan also aims to legitimize Tel Aviv’s carve-up of the West Bank into separate cantons sealed off by a military cordon and a massive wall. This “separation” wall—which will be some 400 miles long when complete—will confine the majority of the Palestinian population on the West Bank to just 42 percent of the territory.

Washington has voiced support for the plan, including Israel’s aim to annex a portion of the West Bank, permanently recognize its settlements there, and refuse the right to return to their homes of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendents expelled from their lands by force in the 1940s. Despite a May 2 non-binding vote in the ruling Likud Party that rejected the plan, Sharon has vowed to press forward with some similar variant.  
 
Washington slaps sanctions on Syria
The imperialist offensive in the Middle East has included not only U.S. backing for these plans by Tel Aviv and the brutal occupation of Iraq, but pressure by Washington on other governments in the region.

U.S. president George Bush announced May 11 that his government will impose economic sanctions on Syria to pressure Damascus to fall into line with Washington’s plans in the area. Congress authorized the administration to apply the punitive measures in the Syria Accountability Act last December, accusing the Syrian government of “sheltering terrorists,” seeking to develop “weapons of mass destruction,” and working to undermine the Anglo-American-led war and occupation of Iraq.

The measure bans U.S. exports to Syria, with the exception of food and medicine, and bans Syrian airlines from flying to or from the United States. The law also restricts relations between Syrian and U.S. banks and authorizes the U.S. Treasury Department to freeze assets of Syrians who Washington deems “terrorists.”

The U.S. government began ratcheting up its pressure on Syria’s Baath Party government after the invasion and occupation of Iraq last year. Washington is also demanding that Damascus assist in its efforts to weaken Palestinian groups resisting the Israeli occupation that operate out of Syria. One of the U.S. government’s demands is that Damascus close the offices in Syria of the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as the Lebanon-based Hezbollah.  
 
 
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