License to keep killing

As the US reaffirms its support for Israel, Palestinian civilians, including small children, were the victims this week of continuing Israeli aggression. Khaled Amayreh reports
Israeli soldiers posted outside the city of Jenin shot and killed a Palestinian mother and her two small children in what eyewitnesses described as "cold-blooded murder" on 5 May.
Israel's latest victims are Fatima Zakarna, 30, and her two children, 4-year- old Abir and 6-year-old Bassil.
"The victims were picking grape leaves hundreds of metres away from the Israeli tank; they posed no threat to the soldiers, yet they opened fire on the three, killing them on the spot," said Nasser Ikmeil, who witnessed the killing.
Mohamed Zakarna, Fatima's husband, said he saw the tank's machine-gun swivel in the direction of his family. Suddenly his little girl's face was riddled with bullets, his wife lay on the ground bleeding from her head and neck and his son was gasping for breath.
Overwhelmed by the massacre of his whole family, Zakarna wept uncontrollably and tore at the earth. Rather than helping him, or transferring his dying wife and kids to the hospital, Israeli soldiers behaved in a characteristic manner.
The soldiers cuffed his wrists and took him "for questioning," holding him for several hours.
Initially, the Israeli army spokesman claimed that a large bomb had gone off near the tank, and that three Palestinians were killed and one soldier was injured in the explosion. Then, a few hours later, there was a story about a fictitious land- mine exploding near the tank. Then finally, the army said that the snapping of a tank tread -- not a bomb or land-mine explosion -- produced the loud noise which "prompted" the soldiers to open fire and kill the mother and her two children.
The killing, the army said, was done "accidentally and by mistake." Nonetheless, the spokesman stressed that the soldiers acted in accordance with standing orders and violated no rules. This implies that soldiers are under orders to open fire on anything that moves in their vicinity the moment they hear an explosion and without any consideration for the consequences. But those consequences are dire for the Palestinians who lose children and other civilians "accidentally" or "by mistake" almost every day.
A few hours after the murder of the Zakarna family, the Israeli army killed a third child in Tulkarm: an 8-year-old boy identified as Tamer Khaled Abu Sirriya. The act brought the number of Palestinians killed by Israel this week to 23.
Abu Sirriya was reportedly playing with his brothers in the courtyard of their home when an Israeli bullet pierced his chest, killing him on the spot. When a Palestinian youth who was in the vicinity tried to rescue the dying child, an Israeli sniper opened fire again, injuring the rescuer, Shadi Anbar, who lost his right eye.
The US, Israel's guardian-ally, seldom publicly censures Israel for killing Palestinian civilians. The effective American collusion also enables the Israeli army to continue its daily rampages through Palestinian towns and population centres despite utterly mendacious claims about "leaving Palestinian towns."
On Tuesday, Israeli tanks rolled back into the town of Tulkarm, shooting in all directions and imposing a curfew on more than 100,000 Palestinians.
Tulkarm Governor Ezzeddin Al-Sharif said Israeli occupation troops detained more than 30 young men on suspicion of involvement in the resistance. He also pointed out that the Israeli army moved the borderline between the West Bank and Israel proper at least one kilometre eastward.
This means that thousands of acres of Palestinian farmland will be confiscated, presumably for Jewish settlement expansion. Meanwhile, the Israeli army continued to consolidate its presence in and around Palestinian population centres throughout the West Bank.
Israeli army forays and raids into major Palestinian towns are now carried out on a daily basis, in spite of the symbolic presence of some unarmed Palestinian policemen. Last week, Israeli Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz declared that Israel was no longer bound by the demarcation of the West Bank into areas "A, B, and C" pursuant the Oslo agreements. The implication of the statement is very clear: no area in the West Bank is off-limits to the Israeli army.
The actual purpose of the virtually daily penetration into Palestinian population centres has little to do with security needs, or, as the Israelis say "fighting terror," but to convey a message to the Palestinian population that the Oslo process is over and that they should come to terms with Israel's renewed direct occupation. In other words, a return to the status quo, this time with Yasser Arafat in Ramallah instead of Tunis or Beirut.
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