After fully occupying the West Bank and imposing a tight curfew on its population, Israel has expanded its war against the Palestinians to Gaza. Khaled Amayreh reports Click to view caption Having failed to crush Palestinian resistance, the Israeli occupation army has re-imposed some of its most draconian measures against the civilian population. The punitive actions include an open-ended ban on Palestinian movement in the central and northern parts of the West Bank and the demolition of the militants' family homes and banishment of relatives of resistance fighters from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip. The new stringent measures, Israeli officials say, are intended to supplement and enhance the already tight restrictions imposed on major Palestinian population centres, including a rolling curfew that keeps hundreds of thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in their own homes for days on end. Under the new travel ban, Palestinians will not be able to travel between the towns of Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Salfit and Ramallah. In many cases, travel -- even walking -- within the confines of the cities and surrounding villages is prohibited. "We have effected a total closure on the Arabs. Nobody enters and nobody leaves. There is no movement between the towns and villages," declared Israeli Defense Minister Benyamin Ben-Eliezer. Naturally, the closure does not apply to the estimated 150,000 Jewish settlers who have come to constitute a paramilitary force that is actively harassing the Palestinian population on the Israeli army's behalf. For those Palestinians who do not take the hermetic mass imprisonment seriously enough, death usually awaits. On Monday, Israeli soldiers manning an observation post on the rooftop of a multi-story building east of Nablus, shot dead 14-year-old Hamza Mohamed Badawi, who ventured outside his home at the Balata refugee camp in violation of the curfew. The child's body was riddled from head to toe by machine gun bullets. A day earlier, Abdul-Rahim Al-Tawil, 40, was shot dead in Hebron while driving his truck back home from the nearby town of Dura. Again, his crime was breaking the curfew. Al- Tawil leaves behind a wife and five children. Al-Tawil's brother, Nimre, 35, was also injured. This week, the Israeli army carried out an extra-judicial execution of 10 Palestinians who the former said were members of Palestinian resistance groups. Since the 22 July Israeli aerial bombing of an apartment building in Gaza, in which 15 Palestinian civilians, including nine children, were killed and 150 injured, the Israeli army has killed more than 38 Palestinians, mostly innocent civilians who had no connection to any resistance groups. At this rate, the Israeli army and paramilitary extremist settlers are killing an average of three Palestinians each day. The Israeli government and military establishment hope that this wanton reign of terror will eventually subjugate the Palestinians, who, Israeli generals and politicians calculate, will be unable to withstand the "maximum pain and suffering" to which the Israeli army is subjecting them. It is not working. This week, Palestinian resistance groups, primarily Hamas, carried out several attacks in the depth of Israel, as well as in the West Bank, killing more than 13 Israeli settlers and soldiers. On 4 August, a Hamas bomber detonated a bomb he was carrying aboard an Israeli bus transporting soldiers and civilians from Haifa to Safad. The blast ripped the bus, killing nine people, including four soldiers. A few hours later, a Palestinian young man from Hebron, armed with a pistol, shot dead an Israeli telephone company technician in East Jerusalem. The gunman and another Palestinian were killed by Israeli soldiers' fire, which also injured 15 passers-by. The Palestinians accuse the soldiers of firing wantonly with the intention of injuring as many Arabs as possible. On the same day, several attacks were carried out in various parts of the West Bank, targeting Jewish settlers who had last week carried out a pogrom against Palestinian civilians in Hebron in which a young Palestinian girl was killed. Nearly 10 settlers were wounded in these attacks, most of them seriously. On 5 August, Palestinian fighters also shot dead two Jewish settlers. Responsibility for the ambush, which took place outside a Jewish colonial outpost near Ramallah, was claimed by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the military wing of Fatah. The same group also carried out an attack near Yatta in the southern West Bank last week in which four Israeli settlers and soldiers were killed. Observers attribute the marked rise in Palestinian attacks to mounting public pressure on Fatah and Hamas to retaliate for the 22 July Gaza atrocity. Moreover, the continuous attacks are meant to be a message to the Israeli government and society that Israelis, not only Palestinians, will suffer as a result of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's brute-force treatment of the Palestinians. For its part, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's authority, which has lost most of its clout due to sustained Israeli targeting of its security infrastructure, has renewed contacts with Hamas in a desperate effort to convince the radical Islamist group to scale down its attacks against Israeli targets. These PA efforts stem from the conviction that Palestinian attacks, particularly the human bombings targetting Israeli civilians, only play into Sharon's hands and lend him further pretexts to continue his policy of terror against the Palestinians. Interestingly, Hamas does not completely reject this reasoning. However, the movement and other resistance groups demand one thing in return for a cessation of attacks on Israeli civilians: a reciprocal Israeli cessation of attacks on Palestinian civilians. Can a toothless PA obtain such a guarantee from an Israeli prime minister whose political survival hinges on the continuation of violence and bloodshed and who continues to consider Arafat "irrelevant"? The majority of Palestinians believe the answer is 'no'. Many contend that the Israel's attack last month on Gaza was intended to thwart a quietly-reached cease-fire agreement between Hamas and the PA, which could have spared much Israeli and Palestinian bloodshed.
