Stepped-up Palestinian military attacks on Israeli outposts, soldiers, tanks, and other targets are leading to a higher number of casualties among the occupation forces.

Reporters for the big-business press have had to admit that, among Palestinians, they have found "full support for attacks, not a truce" during the recent Israeli military deployment across Palestinian-held areas, according to a New York Times article.

As the Israeli forces began a mid-March pullback to the fringes of Ramallah and other towns subjected to a large-scale incursion over the previous three days, a 22-year-old Palestinian man told journalists the attack "boosted the morale of our people."

Three days earlier Palestinian fighters destroyed a Merkava tank, a mainstay of the Israeli armored land forces, the second blown up over the past month. As the tank rolled down a road in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian forces detonated a 200-pound bomb that blew a hole in the bottom of the 60-ton vehicle, blowing the engine out of the top of the tank and killing the three soldiers inside. The tank was once a symbol of Israeli military invincibility.

In response, Israeli officers announced that for some missions they would replace the tank with armored personnel carriers, which have more armor on the underside to protect them from similar blasts.

In February Palestinian fighters intro duced a new rocket, named the Qassam 2, capable of reaching further into Israel than the widely used mortars. On March 19 two were fired into Ashkelon, 40 miles south of Tel Aviv. The same day, two Palestinians crept to within 11 yards of an Israeli military encampment in the Jordan Valley, killed a commander in a special forces unit, and wounded three soldiers, before being themselves shot dead. Palestinians have killed more than 30 Israeli soldiers over the past month, a sharp increase since the conflict reignited 17 months ago.  
 
Support for liberation of 'all Palestine'
A university in the West Bank released a survey in which almost 90 percent of Palestinians said they were in favor of continuing the armed attacks inside Israel and the occupied territories. The same number supported the liberation of "all of Palestine," while almost two-thirds opposed the visit of Gen. Anthony Zinni, the U.S. envoy who is pressuring Palestinian representatives to fulfill Israeli conditions for a cease-fire.

The growing determination and militancy among Palestinians is particularly striking, given the scale of the invasion and the Israeli army's attempt to terrorize the population.

This was the largest Israeli offensive in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 35 years of occupation. Some 1,500 Palestinian youth and men were rounded up in three refugee camps, ordered over loudspeakers to surrender to Israeli forces while combat helicopters hovered overhead and tanks rumbled nearby.

"Some returned insisting they were verbally abused and threatened with death," reported the Toronto Star, which interviewed a number of the detainees. "They said they were handcuffed and blindfolded for hours while prevented from going to the washroom, kept hungry and dirty, and released in the dead of night--when gunmen and soldiers can shoot anything that moves -- and told to make their own way home." At least 150 are still being held.

"Don't think this will make us fear them," said Hassan, 44, a resident of the Deheishe refugee camp. "It will only make us hate them more."

A public storm arose in Israel over film footage of the operation that slipped through the self-censorship of the country's TV networks. The coverage showed Israeli soldiers using explosives to break down the door to a home in the West Bank's Al-Ayida refugee camp. When the smoke cleared, the mother of the family lay mortally wounded. An ambulance called by the father became trapped between checkpoints. While one soldier told the family members to "shut up," another turned to the camera and said, "I don't know what we're doing here.... It's not clear to me what a Hebrew soldier is doing so far from home."  
 
Impact among Israelis
"Fear, and coping with it, have become stitched into daily life here," reported the New York Times from Jerusalem. The article noted that outdoor cafes and other popular areas are largely deserted by Israelis.

In addition there are signs of a growing polarization. The liberal "Peace Now" forces are organizing frequent demonstrations and statements by armed forces reservists have called for the government to withdraw its forces from the occupied territories. On the other hand there are strident objections by right-wing forces to the alleged "restraint" shown by the Sharon government.

Ya'ir Hilu, a young military reservist who has completed two 28-day terms of imprisonment for refusing to fight in the occupied territories, eloquently described the death trap that Israel has become in a letter published in the January-February issue of Challenge, an anti-Zionist monthly publication.

"How does the activity of the state, implemented through the army, benefit me and those I care for?" he wrote. "The 'sterile' Jewish space created by the State of Israel is a ghetto for its Jewish residents. It prevents them from integrating into the Middle East. Nobody is safe in this space--either Jews or Arabs."

In his much-publicized March 19 stopover in Israel, during an 11-nation tour to drum up support for U.S. aggression against Iraq, U.S. vice-president Richard Cheney "placed the onus for achieving a cease-fire" on Yasir Arafat, reported Ha'aretz. Meanwhile, reported the liberal daily, "Prime Minister Ariel Sharon again presented the Palestinian Authority Chairman with a set of humiliating conditions, including a thinly-veiled warning that if the PA leader did not 'behave' himself at the upcoming Arab summit" scheduled for Beirut at the end of March, "he would not be granted a return ticket home."  
 
Withdrawal to settlements
Under pressure from Cheney and U.S. special envoy Zinni, the Israeli government withdrew its forces from Ramallah and elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians told reporters that the tanks and soldiers had only withdrawn to nearby settlements and bases, and could be back in minutes.

In its March 16 issue, the Economist observed that the Israeli onslaught was "designed to show that the army's reach extends to all parts of the Palestinian areas. But Palestinians have been showing that they can reach everywhere, too." The London-based weekly cited a suicide bombing at a cafe opposite Sharon's official residence in Jerusalem where two Israelis died in an attack in Netanya, "one of the most heavily policed areas of the country."

Combined with Israeli accusations of attacks by Hezbollah in south Lebanon, such incidents "added up to a twofold message," reported the magazine. "No Israeli is secure, and the more Israel hits Palestinians...the greater the prospect of Israel's armed confrontation with the Arab world."  
 
 
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