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Mitchell Report Calls For End To Mideast Violence
NEW YORK, May 21 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Former U.S. senator George Mitchell, heading an international commission on the Middle East, called on Israelis and Palestinians Monday to bring an "immediate and unconditional" end to months of violence.
Mitchell, unveiling the commission's findings here, said: "We call upon the parties to implement an immediate and unconditional cessation of the violence."
"We focused our findings on three objectives," he said. Those were: "Ending violence, restoring confidence and resuming meaningful negotiations," added Mitchell as reported by CNN.
To this end, Mitchell insisted that "the government of Israel should freeze all settlement activity" and that Palestinians do their utmost to combat "terrorism".
Mitchell, releasing his report at a press conference, said that despite pledges from Israelis and Palestinians to his commission, the spiral of violence that has claimed more that 540 lives since the Palestinian uprising began in late September had worsened.
"And it will keep on getting worse unless the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority take swift and decisive action to end the violence, rebuild confidence, and resume negotiations," Mitchell said.
"Fear, hate, anger and frustration has risen on both sides," he added. "The greatest danger of all is that the culture of peace, nurtured over the previous decade, is being shattered. In its place there is a growing sense of futility and despair, and a growing resort to violence," news agencies quoted Mitchell.
The Mitchell commission was set up at a summit held last October at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in the hope that it would defuse tensions between the two sides.
Israel has called the report's findings "constructive and positive," although it has rejected the recommendation for a total freeze of settlement activity.
The Palestinians accepted the report in its entirety but they were disappointed that it failed to recommend the deployment of an international force between the two sides.
The report did not blame either side for the current situation in the region.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has said the report could prove to be "a launch pad," is to make a statement in Washington at around 11:30 am (1530 GMT). He is expected to launch a new U.S. initiative to try to bring peace to the Middle East.
Powell's statement will be based on Mitchell's report, a former senator and Northern Ireland peace broker.
The secretary's overtures come as violence intensified in the region, following a Palestinian bombing Friday and strikes by Israel using F-16 fighter jets.
In fresh violence, Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip killed two Palestinians in a hail of gunfire and raided autonomous Palestinian areas after a pre-dawn missile strike on Palestinian factories and security buildings.
The Israeli army said its helicopters blasted a factory in Jabalia village, just outside Gaza City overnight, because it produced mortar bombs used in anti-Israeli attacks, but Palestinian sources said the factories hit were for industrial use.
After two mortar bombs were fired Monday afternoon on the Jewish settlement of Netzer Hazani, Israeli tanks raided the neighboring Palestinian-ruled town of Qarara, shelling a mosque and strafing cars with machine gun fire, security sources said.
Hospital officials and witnesses said five Palestinians were wounded and four homes damaged in the incursion, which sparked a gun battle between Israeli troops and Palestinian security.
Nobody was wounded by the mortar bombs, which landed on fields in the settlement, part of the Gush Katif settlement bloc, the Israeli army said.
The Israeli forces pulled out of Qarara after three hours, Palestinian security officials said.
Israeli soldiers earlier shot and killed two members of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization near the Bureij refugee camp between Qarara and Gaza City, security sources said.
Colonel Khaled Abu Ola, head of the military liaison committee with Israel for the southern Gaza Strip, said the two - identified as Hamad Abu Khoussa and Ahmed Al-Ajami - were each struck with more than 10 bullets in the upper body, including two each in the head.
He denounced it as a "big crime by Israel" and denied what he said were Israeli claims that one of them tried to smuggle a bomb across the border.
The Israeli army said it was checking the report of the deaths, which bring the toll in eight months of violence to 561 people.
Following the killings, Israeli army bulldozers briefly raided a Palestinian-ruled area in the Bureij camp, razing trees and destroying a security building, Palestinian security sources said.
Hospital sources said four people were wounded in the overnight raids which security officials said were carried out by helicopter gunships and missiles fired from points on the ground just across the border in Israel.
Security sources said two Israeli helicopters had fired seven rockets during the strikes at 2 a.m. (2300 GMT) while two missiles were fired from Nahal Oz in Israeli territory east of the Gaza Strip.
It was the fourth missile strike in the Gaza Strip in 10 days.
Palestinian security sources said the factory's manager Saadi al-Aashi was one of two people arrested Sunday by the army at a checkpoint near Gush Katif.
The iron foundry in Jabalia village was destroyed and another factory nearby, which Palestinian sources said produces granite sinks and other kitchen equipment, was damaged.
Journalists were allowed later Monday to enter the factory, whose roof and aluminum siding was mostly blown away in the strike.
The missile strikes left a large hole in a breeze block wall and another on the factory floor, where breeze block pieces, drums of oil and cast iron parts, including a crucible for containing molten metal, were scattered.
An engineer on the scene said the cast iron parts produced by the factory were too big to make weapons and were used to make machines that cut granite and metals.
Windows of neighboring apartment buildings were broken and their walls bore traces of heavy machine gun fire that witnesses said strafed the area during the attack.
Also damaged was a building used by Force 17, Arafat's bodyguard. A Palestinian national security building was also targeted, but that missile landed in adjacent farmland, the sources said.
In other violence, in the divided West Bank town of Hebron, a patient in the main hospital was injured in a fierce exchange of fire overnight between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen, hospital officials said.
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