Israel said Monday it had told the Palestinian Authority about a planned suicide attack in the Gaza Strip by the Islamic resistance movement, Hamas, and alleged that the PA failed to take any action to prevent it, said AFP.
"We were informed in advance that Hamas was going to commit a suicide attack and asked the Palestinian Authority to prevent it, but the authority did nothing," Israeli cabinet secretary Gideon Saar told reporters.
The armed wing of Hamas, the Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades, claimed responsibility for an powerful car bomb explosion near Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip early Monday which killed the "martyr" but did not cause any other casualties.
"We passed on specific information about the site of the planned attack and the identity of the terrorists," Saar added.
The Palestinian Authority announced that its police had arrested an accomplice of the bomber following Monday's attack, the first such action in the Gaza Strip since the eruption of the Palestinian uprising more than nine months ago.
Ezzedine Al Qassam said in a statement that the operation was "a message to the Zionist terrorists who kill our children and kidnap and liquidate our militants" and said that suicide attacks "against the enemy occupier" would continue, AFP said.
The Palestinian's body was found at the scene of the suicide bomb attack near the Jewish settlement of Kisufim, on the outskirts of Gush Katif where several Israeli settlements are located, sources told Haaretz newspaper.
There were no other casualties, although the car had been packed with 120mm and 80mm mortar rounds, resulting in a powerful explosion, the sources added.
Hamas threatened Sunday to unleash 10 suicide bombers against Israel in revenge for killing an 11-year-old Palestinian boy near the Gaza-Egypt border, said reports.
Khalil Mughrabi was shot in the head in a day of clashes along the flashpoint border between Gaza and Egypt.
"There are 10 martyrs waiting inside Israel. They are ready at any moment to get revenge on the Israeli killers," members of Hamas' military wing declared during Khalil's funeral Sunday.
"If the Israelis have big bombs, we have human bombs," they chanted through loudspeakers during the funeral at Rafah, along Gaza's border with Egypt, near where the child was shot dead.
Also in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli settlement of Morag was hit by two mortar shells while another settlement, Neve Dekalim, came under Palestinian fire, said Haaretz, reporting no casualties.
In the West Bank, an Israeli soldier who was seriously wounded overnight in a home-made bomb explosion while on patrol near Hebron has died, Israeli military sources said.
The soldier, Shai Shalom Cohen, 22, was wounded in the head while patrolling in a jeep.
Another soldier in the vehicle was wounded, the sources said, cited by Haaretz.
Palestinian gunmen briefly opened fire at Israeli soldiers at the border as Mughrabi’s body was carried home for his grieving mother to say farewell, said MSNBC.
Palestinian sources said a child was hit by Israeli fire during stone-throwing clashes in Rafah after the funeral. The Israeli army said it had no information about the incident.
Near the Jewish settlement of Shilo in the West Bank, Palestinians fired at an Israeli bus late Sunday, wounding a female passenger, a spokesman for the settlers told the news service.
Palestinian areas of the divided West Bank town of Hebron were under a curfew imposed by Israel after a firefight Saturday between Palestinians and Israeli troops.
Palestinian witnesses said they heard Palestinian gunmen fire one or two bullets at the Jewish settlement of Avraham Avinu in the heart of the city. They said Israeli soldiers retaliated by firing "intensively in all directions."
The army confirmed that its soldiers returned fire.
Medical sources and witnesses told MSNBC that a 5-year-old Palestinian was wounded by Israeli fire and a Palestinian woman was hurt when settlers attacked her. Neither suffered serious injuries.
Earlier, Palestinian officials reported that Israeli undercover soldiers had kidnapped Hamas activist Ayoub Sharwai in Hebron, from an area supposedly under full Palestinian control.
Sharwai's wife, who was in the car with him, said she saw him being dragged away at gunpoint.
And Palestinian officials said an activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmed Mohammed Roai, and his wife, were detained by Israeli forces at a roadblock near the West Bank city of Qalqilya. The army had no immediate comment when contacted by the news service.
Meanwhile, Haaretz said that the dispute between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres as to when the Mitchell Committee recommendations should start to be implemented, emerged sharply Sunday in a meeting of the diplomatic-security cabinet.
Peres said the “significant drop in incidents of Palestinian violence in the past few days show that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat has begun to make serious efforts to calm the territories.”
But Sharon continued to stick by his demand for a “total stop to terror, violence and incitement before announcing the cooling-off period that will mark the start of the Mitchell implementation.”
Sharon returned from his European tour last week encouraged by the European view of the conflict, and believes that diplomatic pressure on Arafat should continue, said the paper.
But he must ensure that Peres joins his view in order to present a united front before the PA chairman, it added.
Sharon convened the cabinet to discuss possible means of reaction “against Palestinian aggression.”
A source in Jerusalem said Israel should continue to pressure the PA, and that "creative methods of interception should be used, not only liquidations. Kidnappings are also a possible way to fight terrorism."
Amnesty International reported this spring that Israeli troops had killed nearly 100 Palestinian children.
Although the Israeli military and diplomatic corps have repeatedly tried to label the children a “smokescreen” for armed Palestinian adults in demonstrations, the UN commission that probed the origins of the uprising concluded that “The insistence of the [Israel Defense Forces] that the Palestinian demonstrators, humiliated by years of military occupation which has become part of their culture and upbringing, have been organized and orchestrated by the Palestinian Authority, either shows an ignorance of history or cynical disregard for the overwhelming weight of the evidence.”
NGO worker Monica Tarazi earlier told Albawaba.com that Palestinian refugee children “have never played on grass; their playgrounds are the alleyways of their refugee camps. They have witnessed their older siblings and cousins being hauled off to…prisons, not to return for months or years, and they have heard about the torture they endured there.”
Moreover, according to another NGO worker, Catherine Cook, “First, it is imperative to note, that while children do participate in demonstrations, the actual percentage of children who participate regularly is around one percent of the population, according to UNICEF.
“The phenomenon of children’s participation has been inflated and inflamed by the international media,” said Cook, the public relations officer for Defense for Children International’s Palestine Section (DCI/PS).
“According to DCI/PS documentation, approximately 1/3 of the children killed in the first three months of the Intifada were not participating in any confrontation with Israeli military sources at the time of their death.”
“Children are not physically forced to take to the streets in protest, she told Albawaba.com. “It is the logical outcome of coupling the energy of youth with being part of an oppressed population.”
“They see their parents unemployed, family members in jail, they face travel restrictions. Going to school or work each day is often difficult. They are part of a larger community that is suffering and like most people in that community, they feel they need to do something to end the cause of that suffering.”
Since the outbreak of the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict last September, CNN reports that Palestinians have killed over 112 Israelis with weapons ranging from stones and knives to machineguns and car bombs. Israeli military sources have reported well over 600 injuries to Israelis of Jewish descent.
In the same time period, according to CNN, Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers have killed 13 Arab Israelis and over 458 Palestinians with weapons ranging from machineguns and tanks to US-made Apache helicopter gunships and F-16s.
In addition, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society has reported over 14,000 Palestinians wounded, and over 520 killed.
Jewish author Noam Chomsky, who according to a New York Times Book Review article is “arguably the most important intellectual alive,” has been quoted as saying: “State terrorism is an extreme form of terrorism, generally much worse than individual terrorism because it has the resources of a state behind it.” – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
