While President Bush was delivering his long-awaited speech on the Middle East on 24 June, the Israeli army was completing its reoccupation of the West Bank. Khaled Amayreh reports from Hebron Click to view caption Dozens of Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers, backed by several helicopter gunships, rolled into the southern West Bank city of Hebron, placing its estimated 150,000 inhabitants under a strict curfew. And unlike the numerous previous incursions, this time the Israeli army stormed, vandalised and took control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) headquarters in the city. And in the process, Israeli troops shot dead at least four Palestinian policemen who were standing guard outside the complex. Moreover, more than 100 other policemen and security officials were also arrested, including the local intelligence chief, Nezam Ja'abari. Soon afterwards, the invading troops began house-to-house searches for weapons and "wanted persons", a reference to Palestinians suspected of being involved in the resistance. Several houses belonging to suspected activists were also demolished. Israeli tanks re-entered smaller towns in the vicinity of Hebron, including Dura, and imposed a curfew on inhabitants. This measure interrupted the Palestinian high school matriculation examinations taking place in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Israeli army says the purpose of the current onslaught, code- named "Operation Determined Path", was to destroy Hamas's networks. On 24 June, Israel's Apache helicopters fired air-to-ground missiles at three taxi cabs in Rafah, at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, killing six people, four of them reportedly members of Hamas's military wing, including Reziq Yasser, a prominent resistance figure in the area. Hamas vowed to avenge the killing, alluding to more suicide bombings. With the reoccupation of Hebron, the Israeli occupation army is now in control of all major towns in the West Bank, including Nablus, Jenin, Qalqilya, Tulkarm, Ramallah and Bethlehem. Only the small Jordan valley town of Jericho remained free of Israeli tanks. Earlier on 24 June, Israeli forces stormed Ramallah, the de facto capital of the PA, laying siege, once again, to the thoroughly- battered headquarters of its beleaguered chairman, Yasser Arafat. As Al-Ahram Weekly went to print, Arafat was still virtually imprisoned in his office, with the Israeli army blocking access to the bombed-out premises. Moreover, Ramallah, as indeed all other cities in the West Bank, is under curfew. This means that as many as half a million Palestinians are confined to their homes, some, like those in Jenin, for the second consecutive week. This week witnessed a marked upsurge in the blood-letting on both sides, with Palestinian militants and the Israeli army both deliberately targeting the civilians of the other side. Last week, Palestinian guerrillas carried out three attacks targeting Jewish settlers in Jerusalem and Nablus, killing as many as 30 settlers. On 18 June, a Palestinian human bomber, affiliated with Hamas, destroyed a bus packed with Israelis from Gilo, a Jewish settlement built on confiscated land adjacent to the predominantly Christian Arab town of Beit Jala. The blast killed some 16 settlers, and injured 20 others. Less than 24 hours later, another human bomber, this time a member of Fatah's military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, detonated a bomb he was carrying amidst Jewish settlers at a bus- stop in the Jabal Al-Muakkabir neighborhood (which the Israelis call French Hill), killing himself and seven settlers. And on 21 June, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) guerrilla infiltrated the settlement of Itamar, a small settlement overlooking Nablus, killing a soldier, a woman and her three sons, before he himself was killed by Israeli troops. A few hours later, and as Jewish settlers and their leaders demanded "revenge, revenge", Israeli tanks rampaging through the streets of Jenin fired several artillery shells on the town's crowded vegetable market, killing three children (two of them brothers), and a 50-year- old man. The victims were identified as six-year-old Ahmed Ghazawi, his 12-year- old bother Jamil, six-year- old Sajeda Fahmawi, and Hilal Shatti, a senior education official in Jenin. More than 25 other civilians were injured, some seriously. The Israeli army said the tanks fired several shells at the Palestinians in an effort to "disperse and scare them". However, it was obvious that the killing was more than just a "mistake" as the Israeli army and government alleged. "When an army disperses civilians in a crowded market with tank shells and heavy machine-gun fire, it is deliberately killing people," said Jenin's acting governor Haidar Irsheid. And the settlers got their revenge, too, in full view of Israeli soldiers, when scores of them rampaged through the town of Burin near Nablus, shooting at anything moving, and killing an innocent man in his twenties. The army intervened only after the settlers set fire to the Palestinians' wheat crops in the area. Earlier that same day, Israeli army bulldozers destroyed two buildings in Jenin, killing 13-year-old Hussam Al-Sa'adi, who was apparently asleep inside one of them. Meanwhile, in the Gaza Strip, trigger-happy Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinian labourers at the Erez checkpoint. The Israeli army said one of the workers sought to assault an Israeli soldier, prompting the soldiers to open fire, killing the the alleged assailant and the two other workers who were standing next to him. On the same day also, Israeli soldiers manning an armoured personnel carrier shot and killed Abdel-Samad Shamallakh, a Palestinian boy aged 13 years, while working at his family's farm opposite the Jewish settlement of Netzarim. The Israeli army's undeclared policy of killing Palestinian civilians in retaliation for the killing of Israeli civilians by Palestinian militants seems to be assuming unofficial backing from various quarters in the Israeli government. Last week, the day the Gilo bus bombing took place, member of the Knesset Michael Kleiner of the Herut faction called on the army to kill 1,000 Palestinian civilians for every Jew killed by Palestinian militants. Similar remarks came from other political figures affiliated with right-wing and religious parties, who called on the government not to allow itself and the army to "be held hostage to international public opinion".
