GAZA, 15 May 2003 — Israeli forces shot dead five Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank yesterday, drawing Palestinian accusations that Israel was trying to sabotage a new US-led peace initiative. The bloodshed, which followed a Palestinian mortar bomb attack that wounded 10 Israeli soldiers, showed that the new Middle East peace drive after the Iraq war has had scant impact on the daily violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Palestinian officials said Israeli undercover soldiers drove up to a Palestinian guard post in Gaza in a civilian car, sparking an exchange of fire in which two security men and an Islamic Jihad activist were killed and two security men wounded. Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat condemned the Israeli operation in Gaza as “murder in cold blood”.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, a 21-year-old member of a the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, was killed and two Palestinians seriously wounded when Israeli troops fired on a crowd of stone throwers, medics and witnesses said.
Israeli troops also fired at a crowd of young Palestinian stone throwers in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, killing a 14-year-old youth, hospital officials said.
Earlier, an Israeli armored force backed by helicopter gunships raided Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, adjacent to the army base that had been hit by mortar bombs. Hospital officials and witnesses said an Israeli missile wounded about 20 Palestinians and 10 homes were demolished. An Israeli military source said the operation was aimed at stopping mortar fire by militants. Erekat disagreed. “This is part of the Israeli government’s rejection of the ‘road map’ (to peace) and an insistence on continuing on the road of conflict, war and blood,” he said.
The violence erupted ahead of US-arranged talks which Palestinian officials said were planned for Saturday between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his new reformist Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, on the peace road map. Sharon has rejected talk of dismantling Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza — one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians — for now despite US calls for conciliatory steps to push the road map.
Israel said yesterday Sharon had no time to meet Javier Solana after the European Union foreign policy chief expressed determination to meet Arafat. Diplomats in Brussels said Solana would go ahead with planned meetings with Arafat and Abbas in Ramallah today but had postponed plans to visit Israel.
