Spoiling for a strike

Ariel Sharon's new "public" assassination policy is not only a means to bring the Intifada to heel. It also keeps his coalition together. Graham Usher reports from Hebron
Ariel Sharon is presently bestriding the seam that separates a rock from a hard place. On the one side -- as at Israeli cabinet meetings -- he is under the cosh from Likud ministers for his policy of "restraint against Palestinian terrorism" in the occupied territories. On the other -- at the same meetings -- he has been warned by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres that he will quit the government if he is prevented from pursuing "contacts" with the Palestinians at least formally on the basis of the recommendations set down by the Mitchell report last May.
The Israeli leader knows a slip either way is dangerous. He needs the right if he -- rather than the increasingly popular Binyamin Netanyahu -- is to remain Likud leader. He needs Peres if he is to stay Prime Minister of a national unity government and in receipt of the enormous international credit this has brought him.
Sharon's stratagem to draw these two lines into a circle rests on a policy that formally remains within the bounds of the international consensus on "restraint" while creating conditions in the West Bank and Gaza that make "restraint" impossible to sustain. That policy is the assassination of Palestinian political leaders or, as the army's new argot has it, "pinpoint preventive activities against terrorists."
Israel has killed about 30 Palestinians through extra- judicial execution since the Intifada erupted last fall. The last officially declared hit was the murder of three Islamic Jihad militants by helicopter rockets near Jenin on 1 July. The sheer scale of that carnage brought forth the usual condemnations from the US State Department, the European Union, the UN and, of course, the Palestinian Authority.
But compared to the task of keeping his coalition together such darts are small pricks indeed for Sharon. On 4 July, the two wings of his cabinet not only publicly admitted the assassinations policy. It approved its expansion to include both Palestinians "en route" to commit armed attacks and those "wanted" by Israel but as yet un-arrested by the PA. There are 26 of these "targets", according to Israeli media sources.
The cabinet also agreed to increase low- profile operations "that do not attract wide media coverage" in the occupied territories. According to Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer these include incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas, house demolitions and abductions. They were swiftly felt.
On 4 July -- even as the cabinet was sitting -- Fatah activist Hassem Natshe was shot in the back in PA-controlled Hebron either by Palestinian collaborators or Israeli agents masquerading as Arabs. On 6 July another Fatah activist, Sherif Omar, was wounded from directed rifle fire during protests in the same city. And on 8 July an Israeli undercover squad again stole into PA-Hebron to snatch Ayoub Asharawi, this time a Hamas leader.
Fatah leader in Hebron and PA Minister of Labour, Rafiq Natshe, expressed the impotent rage of the Palestinian leadership in face of such assaults. "It seems Israel wants to wipe out what moderates remain among us," he said. "If so, they are succeeding."
Indeed, it would seem Israel is spoiling for the most ferocious Palestinian response possible. On 5 July -- following firing on the Jewish settlement of Psagot -- an army patrol shot randomly at a school in the West Bank town of El Bireh, leaving Nasser Lutfi Abed dead. And on 7 July 11- year old Khalil Mughrabi literally had his brains blown out by army bullets at Rafah on Gaza's border with Egypt.
The army denied all responsibility for the murder, other than to say their positions along the border had come under grenade and sniper attacks all day. Palestinian eyewitnesses say there was no military action in the border area where Mughrabi was playing with around 20 other children and that he was shot from an Israeli observation post while running after his kite. Two other boys -- 10 and 13 years old- were wounded by bullets while trying to haul their friend from a newly dug army trench that now runs beside the border.
Whatever the circumstances, Mugrabi's funeral pulled thousands out onto the streets of Rafah the next day and pushed Hamas to abandon its undeclared policy of restraint. "There are ten martyrs [suicide bombers] waiting," a masked member of Hamas' military arm, Izzeddine Al Qassam, told the cortege. "They are ready at any moment to get revenge on the Israeli killers."
The first arrived the next morning, when a white van exploded near an army checkpoint next to Gaza's Gush Qatif settlement bloc, killing the bomber. This was "a message to the Zionist terrorists who kill our children and kidnap and liquidate our militants," ran an Izzeddine Al Qassam wire to news agencies accompanied by a video of the blast. A little earlier an Israeli army captain was killed by a roadside explosive while driving through the Hebron Hills district. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the ambush.
In the meantime -- and in line with the cabinet's policy of "active defence" -- Israel moved extra troops into the West Bank and Gaza and commandeered houses within Palestinian villages that abut Jewish settlements. None of these actions will, of course, prevent the next suicide operation. But they are putting the army in place and on notice for the reprisal when it comes and when the "offensive" demanded by Likud and "restraint" counselled by Peres converge into Sharon's next military strike at the PA, and perhaps Yassser Arafat.
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