OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 7 August — Israel and the Palestinians sunk into a deadlock of violence and recrimination yesterday as both sides ratcheted up the diplomatic war, following a weekend of heated clashes in which four people died. The white-hot atmosphere in the region intensified further when Israeli security forces arrested a Palestinian man they claimed was poised to launch a suicide attack in Tel Aviv, and also seized two members of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas in the West Bank.
Also yesterday, Israeli security forces completely shut down access in and out of five large Palestinian towns following the killing of a pregnant Jewish settler, Israeli public radio said, quoting security officials. The army sealed off the West Banks towns of Nablus, Tulkarem, Jericho, Ramallah and Qalqilya, the radio said, adding that it had partially closed the towns of Hebron, Bethlehem and Jenin.
The lockdown started in Qalqilya, where a five-month pregnant Jewish woman was shot dead on Sunday and four other Israelis were wounded, including her husband and 14-year-old daughter. The Israeli Army also shelled three Palestinian security posts in Qalqilya.
Traveling along the roads into the West Bank, heavily guarded by numerous Israeli Army roadblocks, is sclerotic at best, Palestinians say. The Palestine Monitor, a non-governmental organization, said in a statement that a pregnant Palestinian woman trying to get to hospital to give birth on Saturday delivered her own baby in the back of a taxi after a slew of roadblocks between Jenin and Nablus turned the half-hour ride into a six-hour ordeal.
Marwan Barghuti, a senior Palestinian leader who survived an Israeli rocket attack on his convoy at the weekend, urged all resistance groups to form a united government to reinforce the 10-month-old uprising. “We need a national unity government with representatives from all Palestinian factions and movements, including Hamas and (Islamic) Jihad,” Barghuti told reporters in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
Four Israeli soldiers kicked and beat a wounded, off-duty Palestinian policeman with gun butts until part of his brain oozed out from his smashed skull, witnesses and hospital sources said. Israel handed over the body of Mahdi Mizyed to the Palestinians at dawn.
A doctor said X-ray pictures of the skull showed no entry or exit hole from a bullet. Doctors said Mizyed had been shot in the hip and the wound would not have been life-threatening.
His friends said Mizyed, 25, was shot by soldiers and then beaten to death around dusk on Sunday. “Mizyed was killed in a very inhumane, ugly way. He was killed by severe beating on the head and not by bullets,” doctor Ahmad Abu Baker, director of Thabet Thabet hospital in Tulkarem told Reuters.
Morocco’s King Mohammed yesterday reaffirmed his support for the Palestinian cause in talks in Tetouan, Morocco, with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. It said the king “expressed his profound concern and condemned the strategy of confrontation and repression of the Israeli government.” He also confirmed Morocco’s willingness to do what it could to help end the “dramatic and deadly spiral” of violence currently gripping the Middle East and to “reinforce the peace process in the region.”
