|
Israel To Escalate "War" On Palestinians
TEL AVIV, June 1 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The Israeli army is planning to send crack units into the occupied Palestinian West Bank to beef up security as Palestinian President Yasser Arafat warned that Israel was preparing for war.
"Some of the teams will operate undercover, lying in ambush for Palestinian attacks, while others will be high-profile, demonstrating a presence on the roads," the Israeli daily newspaper Haartez said, adding that the decision was approved by Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.
The newspaper also said the army is preparing for a possible decision by radical Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to launch a new offensive in the occupied territories if the Palestinians do not stop protests against Israeli encroachment on holy Muslim sites.
Arafat had said Thursday that senior Israeli officials were preparing a "new war" to paralyze his Palestinian Authority.
"I have received a letter saying the Sharon government has adopted the principle of a new war against the Palestinian people," he said in a speech to the upper house of the Belgian Parliament.
"The goal of the Israeli army in calling a truce is in fact to mobilize the Israeli mass[es] to prepare an atrocious war ... in which they will use all military means to paralyze the Palestinian Authority," Arafat added.
Arafat was responding to comments from extreme right-wing Israeli Infrastructure Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a staunch hardliner in Sharon's government cabinet, who said Israel should immediately reoccupy Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Although Israel has used U.S.-made jet fighters, F-16s, tanks, artillery and other heavy weapons to quell the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, Sharon has said that Israel has so far continued to adopt a policy of "restraint".
The right-wing Likud leader, however, warned that Israel's policy of "restraint" would not last indefinitely following the killing of four Jewish settlers in three days and a string of resistance bomb attacks in Israeli territory, the AFP news agency reported.
Haaretz quoted senior army officers as saying the limited ceasefire declared by Sharon last week was merely an "operational halt" in an ongoing war - "essentially a breathing space designed to let both sides regroup before the next battle."
On Thursday, Sharon spoke with students at the army training college for staff officers and though in his speech Sharon reiterated his reasons for declaring a so-called ceasefire, many of his listeners got the impression that the ceasefire's end was near.
According to an opinion poll published Friday, more than half of all Israelis voiced support for hardline calls that Israeli troops should storm, once again, Palestinian territories under PA control. They said they wanted Sharon to halt the break in fighting and resume battering Palestinian areas that Israel occupied in its 1967 military offensive against its Arab neighbors.
"In the next 48 hours, we need to go into all Palestinian areas and destroy the entire infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority, destroy the weapons cache of their forces, including those of the militias," Lieberman told Israeli radio.
Meanwhile, several dozen Jewish settlers occupied a hill overnight overlooking the West Bank spot where Palestinians shot a settler earlier in the week, Israeli television reported Friday.
The settlers had intended to park a number of caravans at the site but, responding to objections from the army that a provisional encampment was not authorized, they parked only one.
Palestinians who had to flee their properties during the 1948 and 1967 wars with the Jewish state, own the land.
At least 15 similar encampments have been set up in the occupied Palestinian territories since Sharon's February election, according to the Peace Now movement.
That, Peace Now says, is contrary to official government policy, which has vowed not to create new settlements, news agencies reported.
According to an Israeli military source quoted by news agencies, earlier Friday, Palestinians fired four mortar bombs at a Jewish settlement in the southern Gaza Strip causing no casualties.
|
