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Words
of War Taint The Air After Israeli Chopper Strike
OCCUPIED BETHLEHEM, West Bank, July 17 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The most recent deaths in Israeli-Palestinian post-"ceasefire" violence have raised talk that the bitter conflict was moving a step closer to war.
Four Palestinians died Tuesday in an air raid on Bethlehem that destroyed a house packed with women and children.
"The Palestinian National Authority strongly condemns this gross aggression and considers it as an act of war perpetrated by the Israeli government against the unarmed and innocent Palestinian population," a Palestinian statement said.
The mid-afternoon helicopter assault killed at least two activists from the Hamas occupation resistance movement and wounded 14 people, including a young girl who lost her arm, hospital sources said.
The escalation of the violence came after a Palestinian bomber killed two Israeli soldiers the night before. Previous Israeli military escalations have marked the beginning of the end for a U.S.-brokered June 13 truce that neither side has managed to implement on the ground.
"From now on the ceasefire has no meaning," an umbrella group of Palestinian movements warned after the raid, which killed 45-year-old Omar Saada, a local Hamas official.
Palestinian police arrested five suspected collaborators in Bethlehem accused of helping the Israelis carry out the day's deadly raid, security sources told the French news agency, AFP.
The Israeli army said the target of their attack was a military leader of Hamas, which has claimed the majority of occupation resistance attacks on Israel over the past few years.
It said that a Hamas cell was preparing an attack on the Maccabiah Games, the so-called Jewish Olympics that opened in Jerusalem on Monday evening, in the shadow of the suicide bombing.
Witnesses said another Hamas member, 40-year-old Taher Al-Arouj, was also killed along with two more members of the Saada family, who reportedly had gathered to welcome a relative returning from an Israeli jail.
"The whole family was waiting in the garden," one family member told AFP, adding that nearly 40 people were on the scene at the time. "This was a massacre."
Sharon's office said that the Prime Minister had called U.S. President George W. Bush and warned that Israel would defend itself in the face of the ongoing violence, which has continued despite the U.S.-brokered ceasefire.
The Palestinians say Israel has assassinated around 40 activists since the Palestinian uprising (Intifada) was launched in late September. More than 650 people have been killed since then, most of them Palestinians.
The National and Islamic Forces, a coalition of Palestinian groups, said in a statement that all Israeli settlers and soldiers would now be considered targets after the raid on the Saada house.
A mortar bomb was fired on Jerusalem later Tuesday, in what the army said was the first such attack since the eruption of the Palestinian Intifada, triggering a retaliatory helicopter raid on a nearby West Bank village.
Gun battles between Israelis and Palestinians erupted in the wake of the mortar fire, but there was no immediate word of any casualties.
The tension had been rising throughout the day after Israel banned a meeting at the Orient House (the Palestine Liberation Organization's headquarters in Occupied East Jerusalem), which was intended to commemorate Faisal Husseini who died in May.
Husseini, who would have turned 61 on Tuesday, was the top PLO official for Jerusalem. Palestinians defied the ban and went ahead with the ceremony despite scuffles that broke out briefly with Israeli soldiers.
Security officials put Israel on high alert this week after saying they had received serious warnings of a wave of planned attacks by Palestinian occupation resistance groups.
Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer cancelled a planned visit to the United States, where he had been set to meet with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"We think that both sides have an obligation to exert maximum efforts to halt the ongoing tragedy, to avoid escalation," U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Monday.
Meanwhile, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish rights group, said German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has voiced support for Israel's refusal to allow Palestinian refugees an automatic right to return, which could swell the population of the Occupied Territories.
A group member said after meeting with Fischer that the foreign minister told him he understood Israeli objections to a Palestinian "right of return."
The German foreign ministry refused to comment on the talks.
On Tuesday, Arafat met in Gaza with David Satterfield, Washington's new Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, for the second time in less than a week as the United States continues to press for an end to the violence.
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