Teetering on the brink

Sharon's crimes on the ground against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank confirmed that the "hawk" can never turn into a "dove," Jonathan Cook reports from Jerusalem
The Israeli occupation army launched a virtually all-out war on Palestinian population centres, this week, killing nearly 200 people and maiming many hundreds, the majority of them innocent civilians.
Hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops participated in the murderous rampages, the worst being wanton acts of extra-judicial execution, rampant sabotage of private and public property as well as the widespread humiliation of civilians and the destruction of Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Gaza.
Part of the Israeli army blitz included Israeli tanks overrunning and briefly reoccupying, on 11 March, the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, home to nearly 180,000 refugees.
Hospital sources at Gaza's Shifa hospital spoke of 19 people dead and over 45 injured, a third of which had sustained serious to critical wounds.
Eyewitnesses spoke of Israeli troops shooting at every moving target, and alleged that their aim was to kill and maim as many Palestinians as possible.
Despite its bloody results, the operation at Jabalya, Palestine's largest refugee camp, did not accomplish its military objectives. The invading troops pulled out of the camp after only three hours without having arrested any of the "wanted terrorists," their term for Palestinian resistance fighters.
The brief but bloody rampage in the Gaza Strip's Jabalya camp coincided with the virtual reoccupation of the Ramallah region.
Shortly before dawn, on Tuesday, more than a hundred Israeli tanks entered Ramallah as well as nearby Al-Bireh and Beitunya, and the adjoining refugee camps, Am'ari and Kaddura.
Israeli tanks took up position outside Arafat's headquarters, effectively annulling an earlier decision by Israeli Prime Minister Sharon to lift the nearly four-month siege on the beleaguered Palestinian leader and allow him freedom of movement beyond the city limits.
Israeli tanks fired several artillery shells at the centre of the Am'ari refugee camp, destroying shanty housing and inflicting civilian casualties.
Meanwhile, Israeli operations in the Bethlehem area continued with trigger-happy soldiers rounding up terrified civilians and transporting them to detention camps inside Israel.
According to Palestinian and Israeli sources, the Israeli army handcuffed, blindfolded and stamped serial numbers on the arms and foreheads of around 600 male refugees, aged between 13 and 60.
The humiliating measure, apparently aimed at boosting the Israeli public's morale, was condemned by the Palestinian leadership as "Nazi-like."
"It was the Nazis who stamped serial numbers on the arms of Jews in the concentration camps -- Israel is doing the same thing to our people," said Arafat during a televised interview Monday night.
At least eight Palestinian civilians, including a medical doctor, were killed by Israeli troops in Bethlehem and its environs in the last four days.
The targeting of medical workers and rescue teams is an additional tactic that Israel is increasingly using against the Palestinians in a bid to demoralise them.
According to Palestinian sources, over 40 per cent of the 180 Palestinians killed directly by Israeli troops or through indiscriminate bombardments this week haemorrhaged to death after Israeli troops barred rescue teams from reaching them.
In the Tulkarm camp, Israeli soldiers reportedly stood watching as two injured Palestinians, one a housewife, bled to death, while obstructing a Red Crescent ambulance from treating the dying victims.
The brutality of other killings was caught on film.
On 10 March, a Palestinian resident photographed from his window the cold-blooded execution by Israeli soldiers of Mahmoud Salah, a 23-year-old Palestinian youth, half an hour after his arrest in Beit Hanian neighborhood, north of Jerusalem.
Palestinian and international media around the world -- except in the United States where the incident was given little coverage -- screened the murder's gruesome pictorial record.
The first scene showed the soldiers arrest Salah, whom Israel accuses of being a resistance fighter affiliated with Fatah. In the second scene, the young man is handcuffed and dragged to the ground and, in the third image, stripped of his clothes and shot in the head at point- blank range.
Another three cold-blooded murders took place on the same day.
In the first incident, Israeli soldiers shot dead a young boy passing through the roadblock they were manning, near the village of Surra, north of Nablus. The Israeli army stated that the boy did not heed the soldiers' orders to halt.
A similar incident occurred at the Al-Ram checkpoint, south of Ramallah, where a 13-year-old Palestinian child was riddled with bullets for allegedly "bypassing the roadblock."
And in the third event, soldiers at another roadblock in Al-Sammu' intersection, south of Hebron, fired repeatedly at a car carrying Palestinian workers for "travelling on the road," in violation of a blanket Israeli army ban on Palestinian traffic in the West Bank. One Palestinian labourer was killed and two others wounded in the incident.
The killings were preceded on 6 March by Israeli F-16s firing several missiles at a police building adjacent to a school for the blind in Gaza.
Dunay Sedeisi, one of the pupils who narrowly escaped death when a wall in her school collapsed next to where she was sitting, cried out for protection.
"My God, even the blind are not safe. What has happened to this world when F-16 warplanes attack innocent civilians who cannot even flee when they sense danger coming," the blind, terror-stricken child said.
The apparent ease with which the Israeli army can kill Palestinians these days coincides with increasing calls within the Israeli government and intellectual circles to carry out "mega massacres" of Palestinian civilians.
This week, a right-wing Israeli minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called on the army to bomb Palestinian "markets, mosques, banks and malls."
The Hebrew paper, Yediot Ahronot, quoted Lieberman on 8 March as saying in an Israeli cabinet session, "At eight o'clock, we bomb all commercial centres; at 12 o'clock we bomb all fuel stations; and at two o'clock in the afternoon, we bomb all the banks." Liberman's genocidal call does not appear to be an isolated or marginal view.
This week, the Israeli press published an interview with Martin Van Creveld, a renowned Israeli military historian, in which he suggested that Israel should kill thousands of Palestinian civilians in order to restore deterrence.
Asked how many Palestinians he would like to see killed, Creveld said "as many as are needed... We have to strike so hard that there won't be need for a second strike. Perhaps 5,000 or 10,000 killed won't be enough and then we will have to kill more."
The well-known intellectual added that "what is involved here is a massive crime, but whoever isn't willing to commit crimes in order to save his country shouldn't engage in statesmanship. What we are doing now is an endless series of continuous crimes which will kill us, and it is killing us. It is better that there be one massive crime after which we will exit and lock the gate behind us."
Asked if he was not concerned about potentially being indicted for war crimes, the Israeli historian said: "People forgive for one crime on the condition that it is over. They forgive if it is quick and smooth, and particularly if it succeeds. If it doesn't succeed, everything is lost."
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