HEBRON, West Bank — Israeli forces killed five Palestinians yesterday in cold blood, a day after five others died in a messy “targeted killing,” prompting Palestinian Authority officials to hit out at Washington for its silence in the face of the slaughter. Witnesses insisted at least four of those killed yesterday were civilian workers, sparking Palestinian charges Israel was practicing “state terrorism” after two children aged six and 10 died in the helicopter strike late Saturday.
Four Palestinian men in their twenties, including two brothers, were shot dead early yesterday in an army ambush near the flash point West Bank city of Hebron. The Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions said the army had taken the men from the stone-cutters’ quarry where they worked, shot them in “cold blood” and then put their bodies outside the nearby Jewish settlement to make it look like they had been about to attack.
In the northern West Bank, a Palestinian youth was shot dead during an intense firefight in the refugee camp of Jenin, the scene of escalating clashes in the past week, a Palestinian security source said. Abdel Karim Bassam Sadi, 18, son of the local chief of the Al-Quds Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the radical group Islamic Jihad, was fatally shot in the chest. Troops backed by dozens of tanks and other armor entered the camp at dawn yesterday, witnesses said.
Israel’s president yesterday called for an investigation into whether the army was “trigger-happy”. President Moshe Katsav, a former right-wing Likud party lawmaker who now holds a largely ceremonial position, said during a visit to an Israeli Arab school that it was imperative the army examine its tactics following two strikes in the last week which killed several Palestinian civilians. “The claim as to whether the (army) was trigger-happy must be examined,” he said. “If the army reaches the conclusion that this was the case, it will decide what to do — but it would be hasty to draw conclusions now.”
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat blasted Israel for the latest killings and accused its government of a deliberate policy to derail fragile efforts at a cease-fire. “What happened is not a massacre, but massacres, with an Israeli decision from the highest military and political levels to end the peace process,” Arafat told reporters.
PA officials yesterday called the army’s tactics “state terrorism” aimed at breaking the Palestinian people as a whole. “This escalation is designed to scare the Palestinian people and make them surrender. This is state terrorism,” said Saeb Erekat, a senior negotiator. (The Independent)
