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Israel Uses Parents of Besieged Palestinians to Force Sons to Surrender
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| Israeli
troops kept up Thursday, June 27, a thunderous barrage of fire
on the local offices of Arafat.
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With
Additional Reporting By Awad El-Ragoub, IOL Palestine Correspondent
AL-KHALIL
(Hebron), June 27 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Following a
policy of collective punishment, including expelling families of
martyr bombers and demolishing their homes, the Israeli army is now
using the parents and relatives of the Palestinians held inside the
local offices of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, the
‘Moqataa,’ as human shields, in an attempt to force those
Palestinians to surrender.
Ma’moun
Ali, the father of one of the besieged Palestinians, was forced by the
Israeli forces to come and ask his son to surrender, Hassan Nagi Amr
told IslamOnline.
And
the son did surrender, said Amr.
“The
Israelis gave us speakers to address them and ask them to surrender,
or else they would bomb the area, but no one came out except
Ma’moun, whose father was outside,” he added.
It
was the Israeli soldiers’ abuse of Ali that forced his son to
surrender alone among all others who maintained their resistance.
The
Israeli army destroyed everything and burned a big section of the
Moqataa, said the father later.
Israeli
troops kept up Thursday, June 27, 2002, a thunderous barrage of fire
on the local offices of Arafat, as neighbors watched helplessly.
Hayat
Maswadeh and her daughter Leila stood at a window staring at the scene
as bullets ripped through the air and smashed into the hill-top
building that houses offices of Arafat's Palestinian Authority, Agence
France-Presse (AFP) reported.
From
200 meters (yards) away, they saw two Apache helicopter gunships swoop
low over the white-stone building and unleash a hail of gunfire before
flying away in the early morning.
Heavy
machine-guns then went into action, battering the building which
overlooks the southern West Bank city of Al-Khalil, whose streets were
deserted because of a curfew imposed by the Israeli army, AFP said.
Military
sources said they were trying to force out 15 to 20 Palestinian
members of the so-called Tanzim militia linked to Arafat's Fatah
faction, the main group within the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The
Israeli army has reoccupied seven out of eight key West Bank towns
over the past week. The only city left untouched was Jericho.
“The
Israelis arrived Tuesday without making a sound,” said Hayat, a
teacher, from her third-floor family home.
Immediately
after, the Israeli forces abducted dozens of men and killed four, she
said.
“It
was night-time. The [abducted] men were taken away in their underwear,
with their hands on their heads,” Leila, 18, said.
Ever
since, the family has been living to the rhythms of the shooting that
rocks and booms across the neighborhood intermittently.
The
facade of the building is riddled with dozens of bullet impacts and
the main gate has been smashed by an Israeli army bulldozer.
“The
bulldozer destroyed the main entrance and cut through the staircase
leading into the building like a knife,” said Hayat.
“The
Moqataa is everything for the Palestinians: our birth and wedding
certificates are registered and kept there,” she complained.
Outside
on the street, the guns died down for a while, as tanks rumbled around
the buildings and soldiers with dogs on leashes patroled the streets.
Leila,
who studies mathematics at university, is unable to focus on the
columns of numbers that fill her notebook. Her mother has also stopped
functioning.
“I
cannot clean the house or cook. In any case no one is hungry. All we
do is follow the news on television,” she said.
“We
are afraid for those people inside the Moqataa,” Hayat added.
But
the Israeli army's arrival in Al-Khlail surprised few people in the
West Bank, which has seen a ferocious five-week Israeli incursion.
“It
makes little difference that they are back,” said Hayat.
In
Al-Khlail, Palestinian autonomy has been relative even though it came
into effect in 1997 after difficult negotiations with Israel, AFP
said.
Part
of the town has remained under the rule of Israeli troops along with
400 illegal Jewish settlers living among Al-Khalil’s 120,000-strong
Palestinian population.
The
Tomb of the Patriarchs, topped by the Ibrahim Mosque, is a site sacred
to both Jews and Muslims and this has triggered chronic tension in the
city.
“Intifada
or not, reoccupation or not, all that makes no difference,” said
Shaher Abu Eisheh, a 38-year-old accountant. “Once we believed in
the peace process. Not anymore,” he said, his eyes red from lack of
sleep.
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