IDF kills six senior Palestinian militants in Nablus

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D85E4012-B7B8-4365-8123-8B4341C38A9E.htm

Our correspondent in Ram Allah said six of them were killed when Israeli forces encircled a group of al-Aqsa Brigade fighters in a tunnel. Another al-Aqsa Brigade fighter was killed elsewhere in the city.

Among those killed was Nayef Abu Sharkh, appointed two months ago as the West Bank leader of the Brigades. The group is a part of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction.

Earlier on Saturday, the Israeli forces carried out house-to-house searches in the old quarter for the third consecutive day.

The troops also intercepted the funeral procession of two Palestinian youths shot dead by occupation soldiers the previous day, and took away some men from among the group.

The searches and detentions were part of a larger Israeli army operation in the vicinity of the cemetery, ostensibly to apprehend Palestinian activists on Israel's wanted list.

Ihab Maher Salim, 19, was killed and his father and two brothers wounded when, according to eye witnesses, Israeli troops fired into their home on Friday evening. Informed Palestinians said Salim was unarmed and did not belong to any political group.

Also on Friday, Palestinian Muhammad al-Faqha, 18, was shot dead by an Israeli sniper apparently for violating curfew orders.

In other parts of Nablus, Israeli soldiers rounded up hundreds of male residents and confined them in local schoolyards for hours in scorching heat.

In dire straits

Since Thursday, the occupation forces have blocked off all roads and junctions leading to Nablus's old town with barbed wire and rocks, and detonated several old buildings using explosives.

As a result of the blockade, humanitarian conditions in the town have sharply deteriorated. There is a shortage of food in the town as residents are unable to step out of their homes.

Additionally, two neighbourhoods - Ra'a al-Ain and Faisal Street - are under curfew.

The Red Cross and other relief agencies have tried to deliver food and milk to inhabitants of the old city but their attempts have not been successful so far.

The Aljazeera team was denied permission to enter the town on Friday as well as Saturday.

Israel justifies its regular incursions into Palestinian population centres as necessary for preventing militant attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers.

Palestinians say the raids often take the form violent rampages in which civilians are killed, homes are destroyed and public infrastructure and private property vandalised.

Tulkarim violence

In a separate development, the Israeli army used tear gas, rubber bullets and truncheons to disperse some 2000 Palestinian, Israeli and international demonstrators protesting against the building of the annexation wall west of Tulkarim, in northern West Bank.

Medical sources said several protesters were injured in scuffles with soldiers while others complained of symptoms associated with tear-gas inhalation.

Earlier, Palestinian medical sources had accused Israel of using a "sinister variety" of crowd-control gases which had serious effects on victims - such as recurrent convulsions, blurred vision, widening of the eye pupil and stomach pain.

Awni Khatib, professor of chemistry at Hebron University, said the new symptoms – particularly the violent convulsions experienced by some Palestinian protesters outside the village of Sawiya, southwest of Nablus - suggested that the Israeli army may be using a new class of chemicals that lie somewhere between normal tear gas and chemical weapons.

Incidentally, on Friday a special United Nations investigating team had criticised Israel for excessive use of force and destruction of homes in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In a joint statement, the team urged the Security Council to deploy an international protection force to stop Israeli abuses.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D85E4012-B7B8-4365-8123-8B4341C38A9E.htm

Seven armed Palestinians were killed by Israel Defense Forces soldiers in Nablus on Saturday, including six senior militants, in the third day of an operation to round up wanted militants and locate bomb laboratories in the West Bank city.

Palestinian sources reported that six wanted militants, including the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades commander in Nablus, were killed after troops hurled a grenade into a hidden room where the Palestinians were hiding.

Among those killed were 38-year-old Al-Aqsa commander Na'af abu-Sarah, and the Islamic Jihad's West Bank commander.

Abu-Sarah was one of the top two wanted militants in the West Bank and the leader of all militant factions in Nablus. Since 2002 he has also led the Tanzim faction in the city.

In another incident, soldiers searching from house to house for fugitives shot toward two armed men, killing one, the IDF spokesman said. Troops were looking for the second man.

On Friday, two Palestinians were killed and another was wounded by IDF fire in two separate incidents in the city.

One of the two, 18-year-old Mohamad Foqahaa, was hit as he stood on a rooftop holding a gas canister above his head, the IDF said, adding that soldiers had opened fire due to fears that he would drop the canister on them.

The second Palestinian was killed and a third injured after the two crawled onto a rooftop and aroused the soldiers' suspicion, Israel Radio reported late Friday.

Palestinian security sources said the man was killed as troops stormed his house. The army in response said it was unaware of any such incident.

Religious clerics in the city used mosque loudspeakers to call on Tanzim militants to target the troops operating in the city, Israel Radio reported.

Seventeen people have been wounded since the start of the raid, Palestinian medics said.

As part of the large-scale operation, troops broke down shop doors with sledge hammers and enforced a curfew. Soldiers took over 16 buildings in Nablus' old city, or Casbah, home to about 20,000 residents and a stronghold of militants. Families in the buildings commandeered by troops were confined to one room per apartment, witnesses said.

The IDF said Operation Full Court Press, the largest in over a year, would last several days. The raid was triggered in part by the arrest earlier in the week of an 18-year-old city resident who was recruited by Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to blow himself up in Jerusalem. The youth was caught at an Israeli checkpoint, and soldiers later found his explosives hidden in a school bag.

On Thursday, soldiers handed out leaflets explaining that they are looking for seven men, most from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a militant group with ties to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.

"Help us catch them because they are the ones who are causing damage to Nablus," read the leaflet distributed around the neighborhood.

The large IDF force is also targeting the area's Tanzim infrastructure, which the IDF says is responsible for 80 percent of the planned terror attacks in the West Bank.

Troops discovered an explosives belt weighing 20 kilograms in an apartment and a roadside bomb at a junction, the army said.

The Nablus leader of Al-Aqsa, Nayef Abu Sharikh, was among those on the wanted list. His mother, Dahieh, said soldiers burst into her home looking for her son.

"They were shouting, cursing," she said. "They damaged closets, threw all the things inside on the floor."

Before dawn Friday, security forces arrested five Palestinian suspects in the West Bank, according to the radio.

Also overnight, IDF troops demolished the house of an Islamic Jihad leader, Bassam Abu Aker, in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Israel Radio reported. The army said Abu Aker had planned terror attacks, including an attack in Jerusalem about three years ago that wounded five people, and had been involved in shooting at the south Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo.

In recent weeks, troops have rounded up several Nablus teens who told interrogators they had been recruited as suicide bombers by militants in the casbah marketplace.

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