JERUSALEM, May 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – As talks of a Middle East peace grabbed the headlines, Israeli aggressions against the Palestinian people continue according to plan, with a new Israeli tactic aimed at crushing Palestinian resistance and replacing the legitimate Palestinian Authority with a ‘more cooperative one’, news reports published Monday, May 6, said.

Far-right Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has launched the largest Israeli military operation in two decades, to reoccupy the major Palestinian cities and towns in the West Bank. It was exactly the kind of sweeping operation that Sharon's Likud Party had been pressuring him to launch for months. Before that, Sharon adopted other means to pressure the Palestinians: assassinations, brief military incursions and economic blockades, The Washington Post reported.

Now, with Israel's occupation army reportedly out of most West Bank towns, its offensive against Palestinians, news reports say, entered a new phase with a new tactic: soldiers surround the towns and briefly raid them at will, abducting wanted men, trying to foil potential resistance attacks, before they quickly depart.

The Israeli army claims the incursions, about half a dozen in the past few days, are intended to keep Palestinian resistance – which it describes as ‘terrorism’ -- at bay in the wake of the earlier, far more intense, Israeli aggressions.

"We've dealt a big blow to the terrorist infrastructure and we have to ensure now that the results are sustained over the long run," said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli military spokesman.

The deadly Israeli offensives have allegedly prevented a "very, very serious" attack planned for near Tel Aviv, he claimed.

Before the offensive, Israeli forces tell the Palestinian police they are about to enter the town, so the police do not shoot at them, Dallal said. So far, the police, drastically weakened by the Israeli wide-scale offensives, have not.

Once the Israeli forces enter the town, they raid it, abduct Palestinian resistance activists, kill a number of citizens in the process, then quickly depart.

Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo denounced the new policy. "It's a clear indicator that there is no real Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian areas," he told reporters Sunday, May 5.

He said the fact that Israeli forces are surrounding Palestinian towns and entering at will "means more killing and a freeze of all operations, including schools and hospitals and to kill the life of the normal Palestinian civilian."

According to some analysts, the latest Israeli offensive revealed the core of Sharon's agenda. The 74-year-old Israeli leader bitterly opposed the peace negotiations of the 1990s. They said Sharon is pursuing some long-cherished goals: to sideline the Palestinian President, crush Palestinian resistance groups and reassert Israel's military primacy in the Palestinian territories.

"Sharon is determined to fragment and ultimately destroy the Palestinian Authority, vestiges of the Oslo agreement and Arafat," said Yossi Alpher, a strategic analyst and former official in Israel's Mossad intelligence agency. "He wants to reestablish Israeli military supremacy throughout the West Bank and Gaza and encourage a much more cooperative [Palestinian] leadership," reported the Post.

In particular, Sharon was trying to roll back the land-for-peace formula that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators embraced in Oslo in 1993. Sharon, said aides and analysts, did not trust any peace that relied on Palestinian police forces to ensure Israel's security; Arafat's police and security agencies became the enemy and were targeted.

"In the first stage, he is putting an end to any sovereign dimension the Palestinians would have stemming from their security services," a Palestinian pollster and political scientist, Khalil Shiqaqi, was quoted by the Post as saying.

"[Sharon's] second stage is an interim agreement that would create a state that in reality would be a protectorate, in which Israel would continue to have security control and the Palestinians would have no security services and no ability to stop the Israelis from entering their areas," Shiqaqi said.

The results have been mixed. Since April 12, there have been no Palestinian martyr operations; however, there is widespread expectation that won't last. The Palestinian civil and security infrastructure has been heavily damaged. But Sharon did not demolish Arafat; far from crushing or isolating the Palestinian President, Sharon has inadvertently given Arafat new standing among Palestinians and throughout the Arab world.

"He hasn't destroyed the Palestinian Authority, he hasn't rendered Yasser Arafat irrelevant, he hasn't turned the Palestinian question into a mere subtext of the war on terror," said a Western diplomat. "In fact, he turned the 'irrelevant' Arafat into the only relevant person in the Arab world and he proved there's no military solution. . . . I don't think he's won anything particularly," said the Post.

Two decades ago, Sharon, as Defense Minister, led Israel into the war in Lebanon and was sharply criticized for his conduct there. He took the army deeper into the country than many Israelis wanted, and an Israeli commission later found him indirectly responsible for the massacre of up to 2,000 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The Israeli premier is now wanted as a war criminal by a Belgian court.