GAZA CITY/WASHINGTON, 24 June — The faltering Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire was closer to going off the rails yesterday as another Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli troops despite intensive diplomatic efforts to salvage the truce. US envoy William Burns met with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in Ramallah in a bid to keep the situation from escalating, but several other violent incidents erupted across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Mohannad Suidan, 22, was killed and two other Palestinians wounded early yesterday near the Maghazi refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian security sources said, without giving further details on the incident.
The armed wing of Palestinian resistance group Hamas, which claimed responsibility for a Friday suicide bombing in the Gaza Strip that killed two Israeli soldiers, announced that Suidan was also a member. The group said Suidan had been “martyred” on course to plant explosives by the central Gaza Strip settlement of Kfar Darom.
For its part, the Israeli Army said from Jerusalem that three “terrorists” had tried to infiltrate Israel, adding that one of them had been killed and the other two arrested. A revolver and several grenades were also seized.
The Palestinian Security Council, which groups police and security chiefs generally with Arafat, also held a special session in Gaza “to discuss the situation on the ground and the application of the cease-fire,” the official said. Saeb Erekat, who was the lead negotiator in peace talks with Israel, told reporters that Arafat for his part had stressed the aggressions and crimes being committed by settlers against Palestinians.
Meanwhile, a leading US-based human rights group yesterday called for a criminal investigation of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s role in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
“There is abundant evidence that war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed on a wide scale in the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, but to date, not a single individual has been brought to justice,” said Hanny Megally, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division.
The British Broadcasting Corp. aired a report last week examining whether Sharon could be put on trial for the killing of hundreds of Palestinians by Israeli-allied Lebanese Christian militiamen at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut in 1982. Survivors of the massacre filed a case in Brussels on Monday, accusing Sharon of crimes against humanity. The case was brought under a 1993 Belgian law which allows war criminals to be tried in Belgium regardless of their nationality or where the crimes were committed.
