Before redeploying around al-Khalil, Israeli soldiers abducted several Palestinians

JENIN, Occupied West Bank, October 25 (IslamOnline & News agencies) - Hundreds of Israeli troops poured into the West Bank town of Jenin Friday, October 25, whereas army bulldozers, trailers and jeeps took over a Palestinian area south of Gaza City to set up a military post, news agencies reported.

In what the Israeli occupation forces called “an operation to root out Islamic (resistance) activists thought to have master-minded a bombing attack in Israel earlier this week, the army launched its largest West Bank offensive in three months, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

At least 40 tanks, jeeps and armored vehicles rolled into Jenin before dawn as troops hunted about 20 wanted men in connection with the bombing that torched a packed bus Monday, October 21, in northern Israel.

Palestinian security and hospital sources said five Palestinians were hit by Israeli gunfire in the Friday aggression, including a 17-year-old boy who was seriously wounded.

Soldiers were shooting at anyone out on the streets as they carried out house-to-house searches and enforced a curfew, the sources said.

Palestinian boys do not have the right to carry computers

Contrasting with the move on Jenin, the army announced it had withdrawn from the Palestinian sector of the divided West Bank city of Hebron, but was keeping soldiers on two strategic hillsides to guard against snipers.

Defending the army's tactics in the West Bank, which the international community criticized for imposing great hardship on Palestinians civilians, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer called Jenin a "capital of terrorism".

"It is impossible to go ahead with the easing of sanctions (against the civilian population) when we are obliged to defend our homes from attacks by suicide bombers and car bombs," Ben Eliezer told public radio.

Observers, however, offered Ben Eliezer and another Israeli leaders another “possible and peaceful solution”; to withdraw their troops from occupied Palestinian territories, and to give real peace a chance.

The Israeli army reoccupied most of the West Bank in mid-June after a wave of bombing attacks and has since imposed blanket curfews and blocked off cities in an attempt to foil attacks.

An army officer said the Jenin offensive, code-named "Operation Vanguard," was launched in response to the Monday bombing, claimed by the Islamic Jihad resistance group.

"Out of some 250,000 people in the Jenin area, we are looking for a cell of no more than 20 terrorists who are bringing misery to everyone," the officer said.

Israel is trying to term “legal Palestinian resistance against occupation” as terrorism.

In Gaza City, meanwhile, Israeli army bulldozers, trailers and jeeps took over a Palestinian area south of Gaza City Friday apparently to set up a small military post there, an AFP correspondent at the scene reported.

They are all terrorists, as far as Israel is concerned

Soldiers fired shots at a group of journalists near the building site, which lies next to the Israeli settlement of Netzarim where the army has a full-fledged base, the reporter said.

An Israeli military source dismissed the information, claiming only that the army was "improving the road for the Palestinian population there."

Arriving at the scene, the Palestinian security chief in Gaza, General Abdul Razeq al-Majeida, said "the army is constructing a new military base by Netzarim close to the sea, which is very dangerous for the lives of civilians.

"The Gaza Strip is now under occupation, tanks are around every town. With this, there will be no safe road from the north to the south of the strip," he said.

"This is against agreements and understandings with us," he said about the deployment.

In a separate incident, Israeli tanks carried out a small incursion in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, destroying a house there, security sources said.

Also in Rafah, Palestinian security sources said a Palestinian youth shot dead Thursday by Israeli troops was an unarmed 16-year-old civilian.

An army spokesman had said the teenager, identified as Mohammed Abu Murr, fired at a patrol in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah prompting the army to defend itself.

In another incident, a Jewish settler was arrested in the northern West Bank after he opened fire towards a group of Palestinian olive pickers, Israeli police said Friday.

"The man shot in the air, 30 meters (yards) away from Palestinians who were picking olives," a police spokesman said, adding that the unidentified man from the Eli settlement was still in custody.

The incident occurred near the Palestinian village of Issawiya, public radio added.

A Palestinian was killed and several others wounded by settlers over the past month in similar incidents at the start of the olive harvest.

The Israeli rights group B'Tselem said settlers have also harvested olives belonging to Palestinian farmers.

And in what Palestinians called “redeployment”, Israeli troops said Friday they started to pull back from most of the Palestinian autonomous area in the West Bank city of al-Khalil (Hebron), except for two strategic hillsides.

"The army has begun to withdraw its units deployed in the Palestinian sector with the exception of two positions on the hills of Abu Sneineh and Al-Sheikh," a military official told AFP.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon approved the pullback last Sunday.

However, the redeployment appears to be largely symbolic as troops will remain on the hills overlooking the sectors where about 600 radical Jewish settlers live enclaved among 120,000 Palestinians.

• Israeli Forces Storm Jenin, Shoot Anyone They See 

• Israeli Army Kills Palestinian Child in Jenin As Burns Talks Peace

• Amnesty Finds Evidence Confirming Atrocities in Jenin & Elsewhere

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