Despite renewed contacts between Israel and the PA, there is little to suggest that Sharon is about to halt the carnage in Palestine. Khaled Amayreh reports from Jerusalem There have been some suggestions of late that the Israeli government might relax its systematic persecution of the Palestinians, if only to facilitate the looming American war on Iraq, which it wholeheartedly supports. However, the events of the past few days in Palestine, as well as the official Israeli rhetoric, suggest that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government continues to view the probable war on Iraq more as an opportunity to further subjugate the Palestinians than it does as a reason to back down for a while. In this respect, Israel continued unabated its killing of Palestinian civilians, its extrajudicial executions of suspected resistance activists as well as vandalism and sabotage of the basic civilian infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel's rampages are not necessarily prompted by Palestinian acts of resistance -- as many Israeli apologists would want the world to believe. Some observers have concluded that Israel has an undeclared policy towards the Palestinians whereby a given number of Palestinians must be killed and a given number of homes must be bulldozed and dynamited on a daily basis. In the streets of major Palestinian towns and population centres -- from Rafah at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip to Jenin in the northernmost part of the West Bank -- three to four funerals of victims of the Israeli occupation take place each day. Last week, as Muslims celebrated the Eid Al- Adha holiday (11-15 February), the Israeli army killed at least 10 Palestinians, most of them civilians. In reaction, Hamas guerrillas blew up a thoroughly-armoured Israeli tank near the Jewish settlement of Dugit in the northern Gaza Strip. The more than 40-kilogramme-bomb completely ravaged the giant vehicle, turning it into a huge fireball, and incinerating its crew of four soldiers. Rescue efforts were hampered as the tank's load of munitions -- including high-calibre artillery shells -- continued to explode for an entire hour. The Israeli army censored reports of the attack for over 36 hours. And when it issued news of the incident Sunday afternoon, the acknowledgment was in the form of a harshly-worded threat by Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz, who warned that Israel would exact deadly retribution on Hamas for what he called "this terrorist act". Mofaz's threats were carried out when thousands of Israeli soldiers and tanks raided Gaza City and the northern part of the strip on Monday and Tuesday, killing at least four Palestinians, including Riyadh Abu-Zeid, one of Hamas's top guerrilla leaders. Several homes belonging to the families of resistance activists were also promptly dynamited. Hamas, however, received a painful blow on Monday when six members of its military wing, the Izzudin Al-Qassam Brigades, were killed in a powerful blast, apparently while preparing an explosive-laden unmanned flying vehicle (UFV) which was to be used for an attack on Israeli soldiers. The primitive drone reportedly exploded suddenly, killing the six fighters, but it was unclear if the blast was a "work accident" or the result of an Israeli air-to-ground missile fired from an Israeli helicopter gunship or a fighter warplane. Hamas said it was investigating the causes of the blast, but vowed during the six guerrillas' massive funeral procession, in which more than 70,000 people took part, to avenge the death of its members. On the same day, the Israeli occupation army killed three more Palestinians in Nablus and injured another 23 during a raid on a multi-storey building in the heart of the largest town in the West Bank. All of the three were civilians, while many of the injured were school children returning home from their first day back at school after the Eid holiday. During the raid, the Israeli army arrested Taysir Khaled, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation executive committee and second in command of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Hamas's successful attack on the Israeli tank may be indicative of a strategy by the Islamist resistance group to target the Israeli occupation army and paramilitary groups of Jewish settlers, while refraining, in the words of one of its spokesmen, "as much as possible" from attacking Israeli civilians. "Our position is to confine our resistance attacks to occupation soldiers and terrorist settlers," said Ismael Abu-Shanab, a senior aide to Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly. He added, this position would change in the event the Israeli army steps up the "wanton slaughter" of Palestinian civilians. "If the enemy resorted to the sort of massacres of civilians such as we saw a few months ago, our fighters would be under immense pressure to act in kind. Their blood is not more precious than our blood," Abu-Shanab said. Unless Sharon provokes the movement to resume suicide bombings inside Israel, it seems possible that Hamas would continue to confine its attacks to military and settler targets. There are even some suggestions that there is an tacit understanding to that effect between Hamas and Egypt, whereby Hamas would refrain from targeting Israeli civilians. Added to this, Hamas has expressed a renewed interest in resuming the Egyptian-sponsored inter-Palestinian dialogue in Cairo. The movement's senior spokesman in Gaza, Abdel-Aziz Al-Rantisi, was quoted recently saying that Hamas was awaiting an invitation from Egypt for the resumption of the talks in Cairo. Meanwhile, there seems to be greater willingness on the part of the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership to "cooperate" with Israel for the purpose of thwarting guerrilla attacks originating from areas still nominally under PA control. Last November, Israeli state radio reported that PA security officials coordinated with the Israeli army to defuse six Izzudin Al-Qassam missiles that were to be launched at a Jewish settlement near Gaza. The Israeli army reportedly allowed PA personnel to reach the spot where the primitive projectiles were discovered to destroy them. However, it is unlikely that this event will herald a change of policy or a change of heart on Israel's part towards the Palestinians, and towards Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, in particular, in view of the fact that his marginalisation, if not replacement, is clearly the new government's primary objective.
