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The Palestinian Intifada: A Year Of Tragedy And Despair
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, Sept 28 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - As thousands of Palestinians headed to Friday prayers on the first anniversary of the Palestinian Intifada (uprising), Israeli forces placed checkpoints around the al-Aqsa Mosque compound and prevented Palestinians under the age of 40 and those who do not hold an Israeli identity card from entering the mosque, news agencies reported.
Tight security measures around Islam's third holiest site resulted in a few scuffles, despite the restrictions, which effectively prevented any Palestinians from the West Bank from attending. Israeli police said 10,000 Palestinian turned up at the mosque compound for the congregational prayer, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Checkpoints were also set up around Occupied East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1980, to further prevent worshippers from attending prayer services.
"Come back in seven years," said one Israeli police officer to a 33-year-old Palestinian trying to enter, while they also blocked entry to a man aged just a couple of months short of 40.
The restrictions caused frustrations at some of the heavily policed entrances, where the devout were being allowed to enter only one at a time for the midday prayer session.
In one incident, pushing and shoving broke out when police used batons against Palestinians, an AFP reporter on the scene reported.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, a Palestinian man was in critical condition after Israeli forces shot him in the head in a Gaza Strip refugee camp Friday, while two Israelis were slightly injured when Palestinians shot at their cars in the West Bank, officials said.
Imad Al Najar, 29, was hit by a machinegun bullet at a camp outside Rafah on the Egyptian border, Palestinian hospital officials said, adding that there had been no incident preceding the Israeli shooting.
The atmosphere was tense for the first anniversary of the al-Aqsa Intifada which exploded on September 28, 2000, when Ariel Sharon marched onto the Noble Sanctuary flanked by over a thousand Israeli police in riot gear in show of force designed to incite hostility and impose Israeli domination over the illegally occupied region.
The latest uprising against illegal Israeli occupation has claimed the lives of more than 800 people - the vast majority being Palestinians, of whom the majority are children and teenagers - due to excessive Israeli violence condemned by the international community, including the U.S. - Israel's staunchest ally.
The mosque compound is located in the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem in the Arab eastern sector, occupied and then annexed by Israel in June 1967, a move deemed illegal by international law. Israel has thus far refused to comply with long-standing United Nations resolutions calling for its withdrawal from all illegally occupied Palestinian land, including East Jerusalem.
When Sharon entered the mosque compound last year, minor incidents initially broke out and Arab Israeli members of parliament, who had come to demonstrate against Sharon's visit, were manhandled.
The day after Sharon's incursion, at the end of the traditional Friday prayers, hundreds of Palestinian demonstrators threw stones at the police below the compound.
Israeli forces then entered the compound and opened fire, killing seven Palestinians and wounding 220, 14 of them seriously.
The Palestinians called a general strike the following day, which they declared a day of mourning.
The Intifada burst into public view when a news agency cameraman videotaped the brutal killing of 12 year-old Muhammad al-Durra by Israeli occupation forces. He and his father cowered against a wall and behind a barrel for 45-minutes while Israeli soldiers fired at them. The father, Jamal, tried in vain to shield his son from the bullets with his own body. His son died in his arms and the father was seriously wounded.
Four months later, on February 6, 2001, Sharon was swept to power as prime minister, but his harsh methods have failed to quell the uprising.
After the September 11th attacks in New York and Washington, the U.S. government has put heavy pressure on both Israelis and Palestinians to curb what it calls "violence" and to restart dialogue.
Khalil Shiqaqi, an independent Palestinian analyst, states that the new international context will have an effect on the nature of the uprising and that "there would be more and more expressions of opposition to suicide attacks".
For his part, the head of Arafat's Fatah faction in the West Bank, Marwan Barghuti, says the Intifada will not end before it has achieved its goal of ousting all Israelis from the illegally occupied territories, and predicts it will take "another two to five years".
But Israel also faces opposition from within its own people. Since the start of the Intifada, nearly 16 reserve soldiers have refused to serve in Palestinian occupied territories in protest to the excessive use of force and tortures that they say Israel has subjected the Palestinians to.
On May 22nd, Israeli radio announced that the Israeli military leadership applied for an increase in budget to build a military prison to contain the increased number of imprisoned Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip.
During the same month, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz newspaper reported that a few years ago, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Sergeant, Yishai Rosen-Tzvi, refused to serve mandatory military reserve duty if it included being part of the Israeli occupation.
"I won't take part in a siege enforced against hundreds of thousands of people, including women and children, I won't starve entire villages and prevent their residents from getting to work each day or to medical check-ups; I won't turn them into hostages of political decisions. A siege against cities, like bombing raids from helicopters, does not stop 'terror.' It is a stop to placate Israel's public, which demands 'Let the IDF win'," Rosen-Tzvi said.
Towards the end of his presidency, former U.S. president Bill Clinton pushed the two sides towards what would have been an historic compromise on the key emotive issues that divided them, most notably the fate of Jerusalem, said the U.K. paper
The Independent.
But by that time, too many Palestinians lives had been lost and too much destruction had been caused to Palestinian society as a whole.
During the Intifada's first year, more than 35,000 Palestinians were injured by Israeli live bullets, rubber-coated steel bullets, helicopter gunships and other forms of ammunition - most of which are made and sold to Israel by the United States - reported a health committee in the city of Ramallah.
Nearly 27% of those injured are below the age of 18 and most injuries were inflicted on the head, chest, neck and stomach by Israeli snipers, directly contradicting IDF "rules of engagement" that claim forces are only allowed to shoot to kill if their lives are directly endangered.
Two thousand five hundred wounded Palestinians now have permanent disabilities due to their injuries, 537 of whom are children, the report said.
Another report by the Ministry of Education in Palestine said that there were nearly 95 schools that have been targeted by Israeli attacks, which resulted in the injuries of nearly 2,151 students.
With additional reporting by Neveen A. Salem
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