OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 3 May 2003 - Israel is stepping up the detention and deportation of pro-Palestinian foreign peace activists and will try to block new “human shields” from entering the country, Israeli security sources said yesterday.
“These foreigners, for all their good intentions, end up being used as cover for terrorism,” one source said. “An added concern now is that terrorists could try to enter Israel under the guise of ‘peace activist’.”
British newspapers reported that a British Muslim suicide bomber who killed three people at a Tel Aviv nightclub on Wednesday and a suspected British accomplice who fled had posed as peace activists when they crossed between Gaza and Israel.
In the first sign of the new crackdown, a member of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) was detained by Israeli troops in the southern Gaza refugee camp Rafah on Thursday.
Military sources said the woman activist was sleeping in a house suspected of concealing one of the tunnels used by militants to smuggle arms from nearby Egypt, and her case was being handled by the Foreign Ministry.
Foreign Ministry officials were not immediately available for comment and the ISM said it would release a statement later in the day on the new Israeli measures. The ISM positions foreign activists as “human shields” around the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where the Israeli Army is confronting a 31-month-old Palestinian uprising for statehood. Pursuing their arrest on a large scale in Palestinian areas would require special incursions by the Israeli forces.
Meanwhile, Syria prepared yesterday to host US Secretary of State Colin Powell amid mounting US pressure to end its support for “terrorist” groups, keeping open the door open for dialogue but making clear it would not compromise on certain issues.
Powell, due to arrive in Damascus later in the day, is to press Damascus to consider deep US concerns about alleged support for “terrorist” groups and the pursuit of chemical weapons in the light of the changes in the region. While rejecting the charges, Syria has tried to redirect the focus to the Israeli occupation of Arab lands, which it considers the root of all problems in the region.
The United States has also demanded that Syria “dismantle” the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was quoted as saying in an Israeli newspaper yesterday. “At every opportunity, we have asked Syria to stop supporting terrorism, dismantle Hezbollah, close the headquarters of terrorist groups in Damascus and end the threat posed to Israel from rockets in south Lebanon,” Rice said, in remarks published in Hebrew in the Yediot Aharonot daily.
Rice was referring to the positions in south Lebanon held by the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah, which led the resistance to Israel’s 22-year occupation of the area which ended in May 2000. Aside from frequent violations of Lebanon’s airspace by Israeli warplanes, which draw ineffective anti-aircraft fire from Hezbollah, the Lebanon-Israel border has been largely quiet since the Israeli pullout.
