The Palestinians poured out for a funeral of those killed in the May 18 attacks, where the Israeli regime used warplanes for the first time in its eight-month-long crackdown on unrest in the occupied territories. The fighter-bombers led an aerial assault against security installations of the PNA in three West Bank towns and the Gaza Strip.

Standing by the rubble of the police building in Nablus, a police officer said, "We didn't hear anything in the sky. The building literally crumbled on top of our bodies.... Dozens of our colleagues were trapped." Of the 12 policemen killed in the raids, 11 died in Nablus, the West Bank's largest city with a population of 290,000. The city's governor, Mahmoud Aloul, called the May 18 strikes by the F-16 planes "a dangerous escalation."

The officer said that the silence and speed of the attack took him by surprise. He and his colleagues had been expecting to hear the sound of helicopter blades as warning of an Israeli raid in retaliation for a suicide bombing earlier on the same day in Netanya, on Israel's Mediterranean coastline.

The Hamas organization claimed responsibility for the explosion at the entrance to a shopping mall, in which Mahmoud Ahmed Marmash, a 21-year-old carpenter, detonated a bomb strapped to his waist. Marmash and five others died in the blast, and some 70 people were injured. Tayeb Abdel Rahim, an advisor to PNA head Yasir Arafat, responded by condemning "operations aimed at civilians and innocent people, be they Palestinians or Israelis."

Meanwhile, the Israeli government deployed helicopter gunships against PNA headquarters in the northern West Bank towns of Jenin and Tulkarm, wounding at least 50 Palestinians. "This is war, my friends, this is war," commented Reuven Rivlin, the Israeli minister of communications.

The use of airpower is just one aspect of the Israeli escalation. The May 15 New York Times observed that "recently, Israel has been intensifying its military offensive.... It has conducted regular incursions into Palestinian territory...stepped up missile attacks on Palestinian security installations and continued to 'eliminate' suspects by assassination."  
 
Use of tanks and bulldozers
In the last two months Israeli officers have stepped up their use of tanks and bulldozers in probes into first the Gaza Strip, and then into the West Bank. "By leveling refugee dwellings and destroying farmland, the Israelis have a clear field of vision from army outposts, denying cover to Palestinian gunmen, and can dominate the zones with their own gunfire," reported the May 3 Times. An Israeli officer dubbed one such area a "destruction zone."

After a May 2 raid into Gaza, during which tank shells and machine guns were fired and homes were leveled with bulldozers, an army spokesperson described the demolition as "engineering work."

That such callous brutality has inflamed, rather than doused, the spirit of resistance among Palestinians was illustrated by mobilizations in towns and cities of the occupied territories May 15, the anniversary of the 1948 declaration of the state of Israel. Some 30,000 people converged onto the main north-south road from the Nusseirat, Bureij, and Mughazi refugee camps in the center of Gaza, chanting "no surrender." A similar number crowded into the main square of the West Bank town of Nablus.

In the Gaza protest, several old men carried the keys to their former homes in Israel--a symbolic reference to the events known by Palestinians as "Al Aqbah," or "the catastrophe." The formation 53 years ago of the new state, consummated through a war by Zionist military units against pan-Arab armies, involved the forceful expulsion of some 750,000 original inhabitants of Palestine.

The deaths of five Palestinian security officers the previous day in the West Bank town of Beituna helped to fuel the resolute mood of the protesters. Israeli troops shot the men as they prepared a meal, and dumped their bodies in a hole near a checkpoint. Later, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff Shaul Mofaz told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, that "this wasn't the outcome we intended." The operation, he said, had originally targeted members of Force 17, the security guard of Yasir Arafat.

Mofaz told the committee that, "in his estimation, the armed confrontation with the Palestinian Authority will continue for months to come," reported the Ha'aretz newspaper. Correspondent Gideon Alon noted that Mofaz "also discussed the range of operations being carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces, [including] actions against communications channels, and...'pinpoint strikes,' a euphemism for assassinations of Palestinian activists."

Foreign minister and former Labor prime minister Shimon Peres struck a similar note on May 15, stating that Israel is locked in a "battle for its existence." Peres, a key member of the coalition government of Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon, has taken the lead in presenting Tel Aviv's response to a report of the Mitchell Committee.

That body, headed by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, was established under the government of President William Clinton. While its report sweepingly characterizes the Palestinian resistance as "terrorism," and describes this as "the most 'reprehensible' of all forms of violence," according to the Times, it has aroused the ire of Israeli politicians by recommending a "freeze on the construction of settlements."

Peres rejected the "equation of settlements versus terror." The government is obliged to provide for the settlers' "ongoing needs," he said.

The construction of settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, and in East Jerusalem has sped up since the 1993 Oslo "peace" accords placed parts of the occupied territories under limited Palestinian control. The April 28 Economist reported, "During Oslo's seven-year era, the number of settler houses and flats grew by 52 percent, swelling the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza from 115,000 in 1993 to 200,000 in 2000. These figures do not include the 180,000 settlers who live in occupied East Jerusalem."

"According to Israel's Peace Now Movement," continued the British weekly magazine, "there are now 6,000 housing units being built in the occupied territories," although many remain unsold.

Writing in the May 12 New York Times, columnist Anthony Lewis observed that the settlements "are not peaceful villages but militarized encampments.

"[They] impinge on the daily lives of Palestinians in grinding, humiliating ways. In crowded Gaza, Jewish settlements occupy a quarter of the choicest land and seafront." All traffic, wrote Lewis, "comes to a stop so a settler bus with military guards can go through."  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home