RAFAH, May 17: Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei appealed to the White House on Monday for intervention to stop Israel's threatened mass demolition of homes in a Gaza refugee camp as panicked residents fled.
Qorei's plea at a Berlin meeting with US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice - easing Palestinians' diplomatic isolation from Washington - came after Israel sealed off Rafah refugee camp with armoured forces to prepare for the crackdown.
Shaken by militant ambushes that killed 13 Israeli soldiers in Gaza last week, the mightiest army in the Middle East was preparing not only to flatten hundreds of homes it says serve as gunmen nests but may dig a moat to block arms smugglers.
The plan has drawn flak from Washington, Israel's key ally, as thousands of Palestinians could be made homeless and from Palestinian officials contending it contradicted Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to "disengage" from occupied Gaza.
"Qorei asked Rice to immediately intervene to stop the catastrophe in Rafah. He asked her to facilitate an immediate (ceasefire) as specified by the 'road map'," Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters by telephone from Berlin.
He said Qorei urged Washington to kickstart its "road map" peace plan promising Palestinians a viable state but stymied by persistent violence and eclipsed by Sharon's unilateral scheme, which would drop Gaza but annex parts of the West Bank.
Hundreds of Rafah refugee camp residents were already fleeing homes in the anticipated path of army bulldozers, piling mattresses, furniture, clothes and other items high on donkey carts and rickety old trucks.
The UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees readied four schools with stockpiled food and water and set up rows of tents to take in 1,500 displaced to start.
NO PLACE TO GO: "There is no place for me go. I don't think I will return," said Youssef al-Jamal, 33, removing possessions from his home in the bullet-pocked, cinderblock camp of 90,000 people, a hotbed of militants involved in a 3-1/2 year revolt against Israel.
Qorei earlier accused Israel of permitting "ethnic cleansing...and collective punishment of innocent civilians". UN relief officials said more than 1,000 Rafah refugees were already in the street after the army bulldozed about 80 homes in initial demolitions last week, temporarily halted by a Supreme Court injunction that was lifted on Sunday.
Overnight, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at an office of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement - which includes a militant group involved in last week's ambushes - and another faction in Gaza City in the north of the territory.
The buildings were empty and there were no casualties in the latest of a series of missile strikes since an ambush last week. Militants killed six soldiers with a bomb laid in the path of their troop carrier in Gaza City on May 10.
They blew up five more soldiers the same way in the Rafah corridor the next day. Another two soldiers were killed by sniper fire on Friday. At least 30 Gaza Palestinians, militants and civilians, were killed in fighting sparked by Israeli army raids last week.
Early on Monday, Israeli troops shot and killed three militants trying to breach Gaza's border fence with Israel. Israel's army chief said "hundreds of houses" would be razed to put forces patrolling the "Philadelphi" border strip out of range of militants firing from the camp and thwart the digging of tunnels underneath to spirit in arms from nearby Egypt.
In addition to levelling rows of buildings abutting the zone, now some 200 metres wide, Israeli officials were weighing a proposal to carve a deep moat through the area and flood it to thwart smuggling tunnels, political source said. -Reuters
