“I begged him [the bulldozer driver] to stop, to let us get out of the house,” Mansur told Haaretz. “He blocked the entrance. Sitting behind the glass the driver never heard us…. We were just seconds away from being killed…children, the elderly, women, all of us with our backs to the wall with the bulldozer plowing toward us.” The family made it to safety by climbing an iron ladder that led to a neighbor’s home. “Just as we all got to the neighbor’s house the bulldozer started to raze it as well,” Mansur said. In addition to his home and all his belongings, Mansur’s taxicab—his livelihood—was crushed by the bulldozer, Haaretz reported.

More than 100 Israeli tanks, helicopters, and armored bulldozers, and a large-scale deployment of Israeli troops descended from the north May 18 on the 121,000 residents of Rafah, who are penned in to the south by the Egyptian border, the west by the Mediterranean, and to the east by a heavily guarded concentration of Israeli settlements.

Mansur is one of an estimated 1,400 Rafah residents who lost their homes in the first three days of this assault. Israeli occupation forces have destroyed the homes of more than 12,600 Rafah residents—14 percent of the refugee population—in the last three and a half years, according to UN figures.

In the course of the operation, Israeli forces have conducted block-by-block raids with detachments of snipers firing from rooftop positions at Palestinians resisting the onslaught, and calling in targets for helicopter missile attacks. Two mosques, several dozen shops, and a zoo the residents built for the camp’s children have also been heavily damaged or destroyed as tanks and bulldozers paved the way for the troops scouring through Rafah’s neighborhoods.

In the first three days of the assault, the Israeli invasion forces killed 45 Palestinians, nine of them children, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR). Seven of the 19 killed on the first day of the operation were inside their homes, the center reported. No Israeli soldiers have been killed in the invasion, but 13 of Tel Aviv’s troops were killed in three separate attacks in Gaza in the week leading up to “Operation Rainbow.”

On May 19, Israeli soldiers fired tank shells and missiles from helicopter gunships into a demonstration of 3,000 unarmed Rafah residents who were bringing water, canned food, and medicine to the besieged residents of the Tel al-Sultan area of the camp. Images of the bodies of schoolchildren killed in that massacre being carried away from the scene filled the media. The death toll in that assault was at least 10, most of whom were under age 18.

Israeli army spokesman Brig. Gen. Shmuel Zakai said the crowd was fired on to protect Israeli invasion forces that were carrying out an assault nearby.

The Rafah offensive is part of a wave of assaults that Tel Aviv has launched in the past eight weeks aimed at dealing a crippling blow to the Palestinian struggle for national liberation. Over those two months, all border crossings into the Gaza Strip have remained closed and a curfew has been imposed on many West Bank cities.

Tel Aviv launched major assaults in Rafah, Gaza City, and Beit Lahiya in the Gaza Strip in April and May, as well as daily raids, assassinations of Palestinian leaders, and arrests. Dozens of cadre and local and central leaders of organizations that have continued to stage armed resistance to the Israeli occupation have been killed or captured in raids over the past few months.

On May 20 Marwan Barghouti, a central leader of Yasir Arafat’s Fatah organization and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, was convicted in an Israeli kangaroo court of murder in connection with attacks allegedly carried out by Fatah militants. Barghouti is accused by Tel Aviv of helping to organize the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group organizing armed resistance against the Israeli occupation that is associated politically with Fatah. The decision gave “legal weight for the first time to the Israeli government position that Mr. Arafat has been orchestrating violence,” wrote the May 20 Wall Street Journal.

With Washington’s backing, Tel Aviv hopes to use this offensive to shift the relationship of forces more in its favor as it drives ahead on the so-called disengagement plan crafted by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. The plan aims to shore up the Israeli government’s claims to territory stolen from Palestinians on the West Bank, legitimize the land claims of the majority of Israeli settlers there who number over 200,000, and strengthen the security of the Israeli state by sealing off the majority of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories behind highly fortified borders. This “separation wall,” drawn by Tel Aviv, cuts deep into Palestinian territory in the West Bank and is an obstacle to the creation of a territorially contiguous Palestinian state.

On March 14, U.S. president George Bush spoke in favor of Sharon’s plan at a White House press conference alongside the Israeli prime minister. Since then Washington has continued to present Tel Aviv’s moves as a “peace initiative.”

One aspect of the plan is the removal of 7,500 Israeli settlers who have expropriated more than 20 percent of the land in the Gaza Strip. The settlers are guarded by a massive Israeli military cordon, which regularly meets resistance from the 1.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.

On May 15, some 100,000 Israelis joined a march in Tel Aviv, organized by the opposition Labour Party, in favor of the disengagement plan. Sharon, who suffered a setback when his right-wing Likud Party voted the plan down in a May 2 nonbinding referendum, has said he is determined to implement some version of the plan with or without majority support in his party.  
 
 
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