RAMALLAH: Gunfire echoes through the streets of Ramallah the morning after Israeli withdrawal. It is a salute to victims of the three-day incursion who can only be buried now.
The mourners shout revenge. “Fill your belts with bombs to attack the Zionists,” says one. A signal, perhaps, of more suicide bombings to come. The Israelis have withdrawn troops from several cities on the West Bank under heavy US pressure. For the first time in months of violence, the Bush administration openly criticised Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The Israelis had to wrap up the offensive in time for the visit of special US envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni, and next week of Vice-President Dick Cheney.
President Bush himself spoke up against the Israelis by midweek.
“Frankly, it’s not helpful what the Israelis have recently done, in order to create conditions for peace,” Bush told a White House press conference.
“I understand someone trying to defend themselves and to fight terror but the recent actions aren’t helpful.” Later a State Department spokesman demanded immediate Israeli withdrawal from all Palestinian Authority areas.
The Israelis seemed willing to oblige - but after two weeks of wreaking havoc in Palestinian cities and refugee camps. Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres now sounded caution. “Hope is waning, and if you look at this objectively, you see that for both sides, there is no alternative ... except to cease the fire and begin talks about a permanent arrangement for the future,” Peres told Israel radio on Friday.
But Palestinians remain sceptical about Zinni’s mission and a ceasefire taking hold. The anger over the recent offensive is palpable. “If Zinni is just here to help Cheney in his mission to get Arab support for a strike on Iraq, then it will not work,” says Mohammed Shthey, an official in charge of Palestinian economic development. “Of course there is a lot of anger. If I look at myself I see everything I’ve worked for these last eight years being destroyed.”
Israeli officials say the attack was aimed at destroying the “terrorist infrastructure”. They maintain it has significantly reduced the chances of Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
To Palestinians the operation felt more like punitive action. Standing by the remains of his aluminium workshop outside Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp, Sultan Muslekh pulled a tea tray out of the rubble.
“This is what we make here, not rockets,” he said. His factory was blown up by Israeli troops who said it was used for production of the Kassam-2 rocket. In a four-hour blitz the Israelis killed 18 people, not all of them apparently fighters. Dozens of houses and workshops were destroyed. It is difficult to verify whether weapons were being produced within them. In any case, the Kassam-2 has been used with very little effect so far against Jewish settlements and Israeli towns. Suicide bombers get past the Israeli army’s dragnet more easily.
But Steinberg says the stated goal of destroying terrorist infrastructure also has a psychological aspect. “It shows that Israel can dictate the terms, that the Palestinians have no chance of defeating Israel,” he says. At Shifa hospital in Gaza, a policeman visiting a friend wounded in Jabalya says what most Palestinians seem to feel: “Sharon said he wanted to kill as many of us as possible to force us to give up the resistance,” he says. “That is why they went into Jabalya.”
Most security personnel and armed militants fled Jabalya towards Gaza City when the Israeli tanks rolled into Jabalya, eyewitnesses say. Some of the wounded now in Shifa hospital say they were hit while trying to get away. Others say they fought the Israelis, but briefly. “We shot at the tanks but when they returned fire with their machineguns, we saw there was no use,” says Bahjat, a 20-year old Palestinian who was heavily wounded and who lost two brothers in the incursion.
Bahjat fled the approaching tanks and got into a car carrying the corpses of several fighters. “I saw that one of them was my brother Mohammed,” he says. Bahjat moans with pain while he tells his story. His other brother Hani was a member of the armed wing of the Hamas movement, the Izzedine al-Kassam Brigades. As they retreated further, Bahjat saw the body of Hani, his gun still in his hand. But there are strong indications that civilians were also hit. On the top floor of the Izzedine family house, a huge pool of dried blood marks the spot where Abdel Rahman and his son Walid were hit by bullets.
Israeli soldiers fired from a neighbouring building when Abdul Rahman went up to shut the door to the roof, his family say. Minutes before he had called to the family downstairs to remain indoors. Abdel Rahman was killed instantly by the bullets. Walid was shot when he went up to help his father, says Samah, Walid’s sister-in-law. “We are not interested in politics, we didn’t have guns in the house, why did this happen?” she asks. She cannot understand Israeli actions, and she cannot sympathize with Israeli civilians killed in Palestinian actions. The difference, she says, is that “we are really innocent civilians while even if they are civilians, they still occupy our land.’—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.