HEBRON,
West Bank, Sept 1 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The Palestinian
Trade Union Federation Sunday, September 1, 2002, accused the Israeli
army of killing four workers in cold blood outside a Hebron
settlement, while the occupation army claimed the men were on their
way to attack Jewish settlers.
The
four men were killed in the early hours of Sunday morning close to a
Jewish settlement near the southern West Bank city.
The
Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions said in a statement the
Israeli army killed the four men, all in their twenties and including
two brothers, in cold blood and then moved their bodies to appear as
though they were activists, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
It
said the Israeli army entered at 1:00 am (2200 GMT Saturday) a
stone-cutters quarry between the villages of Bani Naim and Shuyukh,
just east of Hebron, where the men worked night shifts.
"Israeli
soldiers pulled the four men outside and assassinated them in cold
blood," it said.
The
troops "then took the bodies to the road that leads to an Israeli
colony near Hebron called Beni Hever and put them near the fence of
the colony in order to claim that those Palestinians were on their way
to the colony," the union said.
Bani
Naim is a Palestinian self-rule village five kilometers (three miles)
east of Hebron. Beni Hever is a ( Jewish illegal) settlement two
kilometers south of the village.
Shaawan
Jabbarint, the Union’s human rights personnel, said that according
to ‘evidence gathered from the crime scene, the Israelis committed a
new war crime by killing the four innocent workers in cold-blood’.
“We
have the account of an eye-witness, who could hide behind a rocky
hill, saw the soldiers detain the four workers, take them to a nearby
field, and shot them in cold-blood,” Jabbarint added.
According
to Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, the circumstances surrounding
the killing of the four Palestinian workers by the Israeli soldiers
were unclear as conflicting accounts of what happened were given by
Israeli security sources.
Senior
Israeli security sources said that the four Palestinians were
"completely unsuspecting civilians," Ha’aretz reported.
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His son was killed in cold-blood by the
Israelis
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Foreign
Minister Shimon Peres, for his part, told Israeli Channel One
Television Sunday evening that the four Palestinians entered the area
just as the soldiers there were anticipating an attack, after receving
warnings to that effect.
However,
the Israeli army insisted that the men were either about to attack the
settlement or were scouting out the land in preparation for a strike.
A
spokesman for the occupation army claimed the men were killed in an
Israeli-owned orchard belonging to a small settlement south of Bani
Naim, and had already cut their way through a gate.
He
said the men had clubs, axes and bolt-cutters, stressing that they may
have been planning to attack with those implements, as firearms are
increasingly hard to come by and several stabbing attacks have been
carried out against settlers.
He
said the army had been on high alert, stressing that an explosive
charge planted in the same orchard wounded three Jewish boys in June.
For
his part, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said, "We should not
just talk of a massacre, but of massacres which are happening. The
Israeli decision was taken at the highest level, politically and
militarily, to destroy the peace process."
Arafat,
talking after a visit by two Arab Israeli parliament members, Mohemmed
Barakeh and Issam Makhoul, said he passed on his remarks to the
so-called Middle East Quartet, made up of the United States, United
Nations, the European Union and Russia
