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Four Killed by Israeli Raids After U.S. Asks for 48-Hour Lull
GAZA CITY, Dec. 12 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Israeli helicopters killed four Palestinians in an overnight raid in the Gaza Strip, just hours after U.S. peace envoy retired General Anthony C. Zinni asked Israel to refrain from attacks for 48 hours to give the Palestinians a chance to crackdown on resistance activists, news agencies reported.
At least three of the four casualties were said by residents in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis to be activists from the Palestinian Popular Resistance, a broad-based resistance movement drawn mainly from Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.
Around 17 other people were wounded when Israeli occupation forces used U.S.-made Apache helicopters to blast the Palestinian Authority's national security building early Tuesday, then returned a half-hour later and fired two more rockets at the building in a residential part of Khan Yunis, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Witnesses said the second raid hit an adjacent refugee camp. The Israeli army claimed that the "rockets were not fired at buildings."
The raid came just hours after both sides agreed to a 48-hour period of calm, in which Israel would refrain from its wave of attacks, giving Palestinian police the opportunity to restrain resistance activists opposed to any ceasefire with Israel.
Chief of Palestinian Public Security Abdel-Razek al-Majaydeh denounced the Israeli attack as "an ambush planned by the Israeli army".
Israeli helicopters also hit a structure suspected of serving as a hiding place for activists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Israeli daily newspaper,
Ha'aretz reported.
In the West Bank, Israeli soldiers seriously wounded an unidentified Palestinian, who they claimed threw a suspicious object onto a settlers' bypass road near Azun village. Another man with him escaped without injury, the daily added.
Israeli helicopters killed two Palestinian children, aged three and 13, on Monday in a failed assassination bid on an activist leader from the resistance group Islamic Jihad, who survived the West Bank attack with serious injuries.
There was a glaring absence of international condemnation of Monday's killing of the two children. United States and European Union officials, however, expressed their condolences to the families.
E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana met both Arafat and Israeli hardline Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, saying Brussels still supported Arafat as a leader of his people but stressing his "obligation" to arrest those responsible for attacks on Israel.
Palestinian officials called the E.U. stance a "green light" for Sharon to step up attacks on Palestinian targets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In a statement, the Palestinian Authority deplored the "silence" of the international community over continued Israeli raids.
"Israel continues to pursue its aggression even though the Palestinians are respecting a ceasefire," the Palestinian leadership said in a statement, AFP reported. "We ask ourselves if the Palestinian people will still accept seeing their children die while the international community stays silent in the face of Israeli aggression."
Wednesday's four deaths bring the overall death toll from the 15-month al-Aqsa Intifada, or uprising, to 1,071. This total includes 825 Palestinians, mostly teenagers and young children, and 223 Israelis. The current Intifada is being waged to protest Israel's continued military occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile late Tuesday, Israeli tanks made another incursion into the southern Gaza Strip, approaching to within 500 meters (yards) of the Khan Yunis cemetery and opening fire on several buildings, witnesses and Palestinian security sources said.
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