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Israel Murders More Children As Peace Hopes Evaporate
JERUSALEM, May 1 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - As Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat headed for Jordan for talks with King Abdullah II on current efforts to quell violence, hopes for breathing space in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict evaporated Tuesday after the killings of seven people.
In the worst incident, three Palestinians were killed - two of them children aged three and eight - in an explosion Monday night in a house in Ramallah, which appeared to be directed at an activist held responsible by Israel for the death of an Israeli teenager in January.
Hassan el-Khadi, a member of Arafat's Fatah movement, was killed in the explosion, in addition to an eight-year-old boy, Shahid Barakat, and his sister, aged three.
El-Khadi was one of two men wanted by the Israeli security services for his alleged involvement in the killing of an Israeli youth who was entrapped via the Internet and whose body was found riddled with bullets near Ramallah.
Meanwhile, an Israeli settler was killed near a West Bank settlement Tuesday after his car came under fire as he traveled to work from the settlement at Ofra, eight kilometers north of the West Bank town of Ramallah.
Reacting to the settler's death, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer said Israel was "determined to continue the struggle against terrorism, concentrating on those who commit attacks and those who send them."
From Beirut, a resistance group opposed to Arafat, the Brigades of the Martyrs of al-Aqsa, claimed responsibility.
Also, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas, the Ezzedin al-Qassam brigades, on Tuesday claimed responsibility - at a funeral for two of its activists killed the day before - for the death of the Israeli settler.
The funeral was for two Hamas members killed Monday when their car exploded in a garage in Gaza City, destroying two buildings.
A Palestinian police officer, Mohamed Abu Jabar, a captain aged 57, was also killed Tuesday by shells fired from an Israeli tank near the Rafah crossing point between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, a Palestinian hospital official said.
Four other people were hurt in the attack, including a woman who was seriously wounded.
Local officials said the tank fired on Palestinians who were trying to stop bulldozers clearing an area of land near the frontier.
Israel, which has a record of assassinating Palestinian activists, denied responsibility for its tank firing on Palestinians.
"Israel is now targeting populated areas. It is an unprecedented war in which the Israelis are trying to terrorize the Palestinian people," Nabil Amer, minister for parliamentary affairs, said on Voice of Palestine radio.
Jabar's death brought to 507 the number of people killed in the Palestinian territories and Israel as a direct result of the seven-month-old Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation.
The deaths comprise 418 Palestinians, 13 Israeli Arabs, 75 other Israelis and one German.
Also Tuesday, the Israeli army reported that two mortar bombs were fired at an Israeli settlement in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Israeli television on Monday that "the ball was now in the Palestinian camp. Arafat has to prove he can impose the ceasefire, otherwise there won't be any negotiations" with Israel.
Arafat was due in Jordan Tuesday for talks with King Abdullah II on political and diplomatic efforts underway to quell the violence.
Arafat was expected in the late afternoon and would immediate hold talks with Abdullah on his separate discussions Sunday and Monday with Peres and Europe's top diplomat Javier Solana.
Jordan and Egypt are proposing a series of confidence building measures, including a pullback of Israeli troops to their positions before the start of the fighting in September, a freeze on settlement construction and renewed security cooperation between the two sides.
Abdullah discussed the plan Sunday with Peres and again on Monday with Solana who has given it the thumbs up; saying it "lights up the path in order to achieve progress".
Israel is opposed to a freeze on settlement building in the Palestinian territories, which Abdullah has defined as a "clear violation" of international law.
Ambassador Omar al-Khatib said Arafat would fly late Tuesday to South Africa where on Thursday he is awaited in Pretoria to hold talks with a ministerial committee from the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) on Palestinian affairs.
South African Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad has said Israel had not been invited, as it was not a member of NAM, which is also seeking ways to contribute to an end to the violence between Israel and the Palestinians.
The NAM committee on Palestine was set up in 1983, and comprises representatives of Algeria, Bangladesh, Cuba, India, Indonesia, the Palestinian Authority, Senegal, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
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