Israel raids refugee camps

NUSAIRAT REFUGEE CAMP (Gaza) — Israeli forces backed by helicopter gunships raided Gaza refugee camps yesterday after killing four Palestinians who the army said were on their way to attack Jewish settlements.

In a separate incident, police said they killed an armed Palestinian who broke into a home in the Israeli village of Maor three miles from the West Bank. An Israeli couple in the house escaped when the intruder’s rifle jammed.

The army said it sent infantry and armour, supported by assault helicopters, into the Nusairat, Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps in central Gaza Strip as part of its “continuing battle against terrorism”.

The camps are strongholds of Palestinian fighters who have waged an uprising for independence for more than two years.

In overnight forays into the southern and central Gaza Strip 25 houses were destroyed by tanks and bulldozers in Rafah on the Egyptian border.

At least fourteen Palestinians were arrested in raids in Gaza and the West Bank, including four alleged Al Aqsa Martyrs Briagdes members.

Israeli President Moshe Katsav made a powerful call yesterday for a “new strategy” to end more than two years of violence that has cost close to 3,000 lives.

Katsav said he suspected the solutions offered by the left and right in their election manifestos were redundant.

“I don’t see a solution to the problem of terrorism coming from the left nor the right. We need a new strategy,” Katsav, a former member of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Likud party, told army radio

“The time has come to examine whether Israel is heading in the right direction,” the president said without suggesting what this new direction might be.

Ambulance workers said several Palestinians were wounded before Israeli forces withdrew from Nusairat and Bureij after a two-hour night operation.

On Wednesday night, troops shot dead three Palestinian teens, one aged 15 and the other two 16, who they said had been trying to attack a Jewish settlement in northern Gaza.

“Thank God he got what he always dreamt of — martyrdom,” Atteya Dawass, the father of one of the youngsters, said at their funeral. The army also said it killed a fighter on his way to bomb a settlement in the West Bank.

After daybreak, the army began an operation in Maghazi, sending in 10 tanks and armoured personnel carriers and detaining 13 people before pulling out several hours later, Palestinian security sources said.

The violence came amid US calls for calm in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to avoid complicating Washington’s plans for possible war on Iraq.

Called to arms from mosque loudspeakers, fighters flocked to the streets of Nusairat and Bureij and exchanged shots with Israeli troops on the outskirts of the camps.

In Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza, where Israeli forces regularly operate to uncover gunrunning tunnels from nearby Egypt, witnesses said bulldozers demolished 23 structures. The army said it destroyed the buildings after fighters inside shot at troops. Two soldiers were wounded in the raid, it said.

In Maor, an agricultural community, police said a three-hour night-time standoff ended when they killed a man armed with an M-16 rifle who was holed up in a house he had broken into. The owner of the home, Swiss immigrant Roland Mori, said the intruder got off one wild shot before his rifle jammed.

“I shouted to my wife, in French, to flee and I immediately began to throw everything I found on the living room table at the terrorist,” Mori told reporters.

He said his wife jumped out of a bedroom window and he ran out of the front door, leaving the fighter inside.

A senior Israeli commander, commenting on the killing of the three youths in Gaza, said they had been spotted climbing a security fence protecting the Jewish settlement of Elei Sinai and heading towards it.

“They were dressed in dark civilian clothes and were advancing in a crouch, commando-style,” said Colonel Ofer Shafran. “We found two wire-cutters and a knife on their bodies.”

Palestinian security sources and the youths’ relatives said they had apparently acted independently, and had no known affiliations with fighter groups.

At the youngsters’ funeral, Dawass said his son Mohammed had been driven to despair by Israeli military actions against the Palestinians and decided to avenge his people with a martyrdom mission.

“Kids of their age should be playing in the streets or with computers but Israel has deprived our children of every joy of life,” he said.

— Reuters, AFP