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Israel Builds Buffer Zone, Sharon Vows To Win ‘War’
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Sharon vows to win war against the Palestinians |
GAZA
CITY, Feb. 17 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Israel’s occupation army
is building a buffer zone on Palestinian land the length of the Gaza Strip, a
senior Palestinian security official charged on Sunday, news agencies reported.
"Starting
last week, the Israeli army has been making a buffer zone parallel to the Green
Line all the way along the Gaza Strip, to a different depth according to the
situation on the ground, but mostly one kilometer (half a mile) deep,"
Colonel Khalid Abu al-Ula of the Israeli-Palestinian military liaison committee
told AFP.
He
said Israeli forces had also occupied or destroyed all the Palestinian security
posts in the buffer zone, which he said stretched from Rafah on the southern
border with Egypt to Beit Hanoun in the north.
He
accused the Israeli occupation army of having, in a week of tank incursions,
taken over all strategic high land to give them clear command of the border
area.
Israeli
tanks have rolled in and out of towns from the north to the center of the Gaza
Strip in a series of raids that have sparked deadly shootouts and left a number
of Palestinians dead.
In
the latest raid, Palestinian security officials said bulldozers and jeeps
transporting Israeli special units, backed up by tanks, took over an area of
high land east of the Jabaliya refugee camp, on the northern edge of Gaza City.
Israeli
Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer stressed such zones would not be
permanent.
Abu
al-Ula said that lopping off the eastern edge of the Gaza Strip as a buffer zone
was "a violation of every agreement from Oslo to Tabah," referring to
the 1993 accord which set up the Palestinian Authority and the Tabah talks in
early 2001, the last official peace negotiations in the region.
In
its continuing aggression, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at Palestinian
buildings in the West Bank city of Nablus early Sunday.
In
the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian police officer who had been wounded by an Israeli
soldiers died in a hospital.
The
missiles hit the headquarters of the Nablus governor, a police station, an empty
residence intended for Palestinian President Yasser Arafat on his visits to the
city and an apartment block, witnesses said. A resident of the apartment block
was lightly injured.
The
F-16 helicopter attack followed a martyr operation in a pizza restaurant at the
Jewish settlement of Karnei Shomron, done in retaliation to the Israeli
continuous aggression against the Palestinian civilians.
Meanwhile,
Israeli hawkish premier vowed Sunday to win the "war" against the
Palestinians.
"Israel
has never lost a war and will win this one declared by the Palestinians,"
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told security officials in a meeting to
discuss the situation Saturday night, after renewed attacks capped a weekend of
raging violence.
"If
we remain united we will attain our goal, we will triumph," said Sharon,
threatening to step up military operations.
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