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Israel Pulls Out Of Ramallah But Maintains
Stranglehold
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Nov 7 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Israeli forces withdrew from Ramallah Wednesday as part of a staggered withdrawal from Palestinian land, but maintained their choke-hold on the city as Israeli forces killed two more Palestinians in separate incidents.
Withdrawals have often been just a question of tanks reversing a few hundred yards into Israeli-controlled territory.
But all checkpoints leading into the city were still closed to traffic, and bulldozers destroyed a strip of road to the north.
"This withdrawal is nonsense," a senior Palestinian security officer said.
"Getting into Ramallah will be just as difficult", he added, referring to the three-week occupation of the city.
Israel has already withdrawn from three towns it invaded, but its forces remain in place in Tulkarem and Jenin in the northern West Bank and around Nablus, around 18 miles (30 kilometers) north of Ramallah.
Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said Israeli forces would withdraw from the other towns in the coming days.
Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo dismissed the move as a public relations exercise, describing the pull-back from Qalqiliya late Sunday as turning "an unbearable closure into an airtight siege that the city's residents cannot get around."
The withdrawal came after intense U.S.-led pressure on Israel to de-escalate its military operations, which have dented U.S. efforts to win Arab backing for the war on Afghanistan.
Despite the pull-out, violence still flared across the region.
In the southern Gaza Strip, Israeli tanks killed a young Palestinian man and wounded three other people as heavy machine-gun fire pounded the Khan Yunis refugee camp.
The shooting, which the army said was in response to a Palestinian mortar attack on a nearby Jewish settlement, left a pregnant Palestinian woman in critical condition.
In the Al-Khalil (Hebron) area, an activist of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement died in Israeli custody after an undercover Israeli unit opened fire on him in his home and then arrested him. His son and another man were also injured in the raid.
Local Fatah leaders said he had been summarily executed.
Israel has in the past 13 months of the current Palestinian Intifada assassinated at least 70 Palestinian political leaders and figures in a liquidation policy criticized by the international community, human rights organizations and the Jewish state's staunchest ally - the U.S.
Israeli commander Lieutenant Colonel Dror Weinberg told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that Isa Daba Absah - accused of killing a Jewish settler - had pulled a pistol on the arrest team that shot him.
The death brought to 961 the number of people killed as a result of the Palestinian uprising, which broke out on September 28 of last year. Over 800 of the dead are Palestinians.
Meanwhile, the five Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in two separate incidents Tuesday were buried today.
At the Palestinian funerals in Jenin and Al-Khalil (Hebron), mourners called for vengeance on Israel, which killed the two senior activists in a car bomb assassination operation in Jenin on Tuesday.
The Red Crescent ambulance service, which removed the bodies of three men killed by the Israeli army near Nablus, accused the army of executing the three men.
The Palestine Media Center, a media clearinghouse, said all three had been shot in the head, clearly illustrating a "shoot to kill" policy that defies U.N. regulations designed to protect people under occupied rule.
Senior Israeli army officials have repeatedly declared in the past that forces are told not to aim to kill unless their lives are directly in jeopardy. Human rights organizations and international journalists have stated that the Israeli army systematically acts in contradiction to such
assertions.
Meanwhile, a Palestinian high court in Gaza city ordered the release of two senior Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leaders detained without charge since the group claimed responsibility for the killing of
Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi in a tit-for-tat hit for Israel's assassination
of PFLP chief Abu Ali Mustapha.
Palestinian rights groups have accused Israeli police - under pressure to control "extremist" groups - of violating
Palestinian civil rights with "arbitrary" detentions.
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