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Israeli Forces Kill Three Palestinians, Including Schoolgirl
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Oct 18 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Three Palestinians, including a 12-year-old schoolgirl, were killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank town of Ramallah Thursday when Israeli tanks and bulldozers ploughed into the edges of the town, Palestinian medics said.
The incursions came a day after the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) shot dead Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, following up the attack with a bomb attack in southern Israel that injured two Israeli soldiers, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
The PFLP said the assassination was to avenge Israel's assassination of its leader, Abu Ali Mustapha, in August.
Hospital officials identified the girl as Riham Ward, killed when at least one tank shell hit the Ibrahim school in Jenin, in the northern West Bank. At least three other pupils were wounded, medics said.
In Ramallah to the south, two Palestinian men were killed in clashes that erupted when at least seven tanks moved into autonomous Palestinian zones and armored bulldozers started demolishing anti-tank defenses.
Israeli forces gunned down 24-year-old police sergeant Marwan Ibrahim Sabri. Another man, Mohammed Abu Raz, was also killed.
An army spokesman said the Israeli forces in Jenin had come under Palestinian fire.
The raiding forces announced in Arabic a strict curfew over loudspeakers, warning people in the towns not to leave their homes.
The latest killings brought the death toll from nearly 13 months of unrest in the region to 881, including 682 Palestinians and 177 Israelis.
Israel has issued an ultimatum to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority to extradite those in the PFLP responsible for Zeevi's death immediately and outlaw the Marxist group or be classified as harboring terrorists.
The Palestinian leadership flatly refused the ultimatum.
Israel, which had been criticized by Washington for killing Palestinian resistance activists, consciously aped its main ally in the wake of the Zeevi killing. It equated the first targeted killing ever of a cabinet minister by Palestinian resistance activists with the September 11th attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Israel told Arafat, who had been riding a wave of international support in European capitals earlier in the week, that he now faces the acid test as a U.S.-led coalition wages unrelenting "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan.
"The cabinet has decided to demand that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority extradite immediately the assassins of Minister Zeevi," cabinet secretary Gidon Saar said.
If not, Israel warned, Arafat risked finding himself in the same position as Afghanistan's regime, the Taliban, which is under U.S.-led air strikes for refusing to hand over suspect Osama bin Laden, news agencies reported.
Israel also expects the Palestinians "to declare illegal all the terrorist organizations" Gidon said.
"If the Palestinian Authority does not meet our demands, there will be no choice but to consider it as an entity that supports terrorism and to act accordingly," he warned.
PFLP officials said Palestinian police had swooped on several of their members overnight, including their spokesman in Ramallah.
Arafat also assured Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres he would do everything possible to arrest the murderers, a diplomat said.
But there was no immediate sign the Palestinians were planning to hand over the suspects to Israel.
Israeli Public Security Minister Uzi Landau said Israel knew the identities of Zeevi's killers and warned that it also knew the location of the PFLP headquarters in Ramallah, AFP reported.
He accused Arafat of protecting the PFLP, "just like the Taliban regime in Afghanistan is protecting Osama bin Laden."
Zeevi had advocated the removal Palestinians from their homeland in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel, saying they should be "transferred" to neighboring Arab states.
The targeted killing threw growing peace efforts into a tailspin, with Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair urging Israeli restraint.
U.S. President George W. Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, praised the Palestinian Authority's "appropriate" condemnation of Zeevi's killing, but warned "words are not enough ... The PA must immediately find and bring to justice those who committed this murder," news agencies reported.
Meanwhile, Palestinian security officials said Israeli tanks and bulldozers made a brief incursion in the northern Gaza Strip, flattening several acres of farmland near the Jewish settlement of Alei Sinai, where two Israelis were shot dead in a raid earlier this month.
And in Bethlehem, to the south of Jerusalem, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was seriously injured when Israel troops shot him in the head with a rubber-coated metal bullet while a crowd of children were throwing stones at troops.
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