Israeli forces reoccupied all of the Palestinian areas more than one year ago, leaving the inhabitants under tough conditions

By Abdul Raheem Ali, IOL Cairo Staff

CAIRO, April 24 (IslamOnline.net) – As Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and prime minister-designate Mahmud Abbas broke their deadlock, Islamic resistance movements Wednesday, April 23, ruled out the new cabinet would stand up against the Intifada or succumb to Israel's calls for an end attacks against the Jewish state.

"Palestinians now have a larger degree of awareness of what happens on regional and international scenes in general and on the Palestinian situation in particular," Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, one of Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas' senior political leaders, told IslamOnline.net, shortly after Arafat and Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, found a common ground on the new government.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said once if Abu Mazen, who has spoken out against the Palestinian uprising, takes office he would meet with him.

But Hamas warned on Wednesday the new moderate cabinet not to take on resistance fighters. The resistance group has spearheaded the Intifada and is on a U.S. list of “terrorist” organizations.

"The Zionist occupation is terrorism. If this cabinet resists and makes war against the occupation, we will welcome it, but if this cabinet makes war against the mujahedeen, we will not welcome it," a group leader said, using the Arabic term for holy warriors.

"Unexpected"

Many resistance groups expected that any coming government would not dare to stop the Intifada as all Palestinian areas are under tough Israeli closure and continued military aggressions that left many people abducted and several houses demolished or raided.

"It is not possible that Abu Mazen's government or that of any others would move to halt the Intifada against the Israeli occupation or put on its agenda means to undermine it," Mahmud al-Hindi, a spokesman for resistance movement Islamic Jihad, told IslamOnline.net.

Israeli occupation forces thrust into a hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin a day earlier, and abducted three of the Islamic Jihad fighters, including a key local leader of where he had been admitted to the hospital two days earlier after being shot in the leg in an exchange of fire during an Israeli raid on the town.

On Thursday morning rush hour, a Palestinian blew himself up at an Israeli train station, killing one guard and injuring 13, police and medics said.

Israeli army radio said the bomber was from the refugee camp of Balata in the nearby West Bank city of Nablus, which was besieged and suffered a tight curfew by Israeli occupation forces for more than a year.

The blast proves that securing a military solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is wrong as the attacker came from Palestinian areas, fully occupied by the Israeli forces, and managed to break through all security barriers and carry out the attack," Al-Jazzera correspondent said.

Israel said the Thursday attack proved that the new Palestinian government's priority should be to crack down on the resistance fighters.

"This attack proves that the first priority of the new Palestinian government should be to wage war against “terrorist organizations” such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad and not to negotiate with them," said a high-ranking official.

But the Palestinian groups said that there is no one to blame but the Israeli government.

"Every day Palestinians mourn more deaths at the hands of the occupation forces with an absolute international silence; but when one Israeli is killed all line up for condemnation," said a Fatah leader.

"We don't want to target Israeli civilians in our attacks, but they begin killing ours first," he added, referring to Israeli shooting of Palestinian residents, including children and women. 

On Tuesday, April 22, the right-wing speaker of the Israeli parliament, Reuven Rivlin, laid the first stone in a project to build more houses in a West Bank Jewish settlement that Sharon had earlier hinted might be dismantled.

Rivlin, a close associate of Sharon, visited the settlement of Shiloh, 10 kilometers (six miles) north of Ramallah, to take part in the inauguration of a new neighborhood under construction.

Sharon said in an interview on April 13 that Israel, as part of the peace process, would have to relinquish some areas closely associated with Jewish history.

Jewish settlements, considered illegal by the international community, are the main focus of the 30-month Palestinian Intifada, which has left more than 3,000 people dead, mostly Palestinians but also hundreds of Israelis.

Around 200,000 people live in the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.