GAZA CITY, 29 April 2004 — A Hamas fighter was killed and four Israeli soldiers wounded in a car bombing on a Gaza Strip settlement yesterday, while a leading Palestinian peace campaigner was briefly arrested in East Jerusalem.
The Israeli forces continued their campaign of house to house search across the West Bank yesterday, witnesses said. Beit Sahour has been under curfew for the third day yesterday with all the entrances to the city were blocked by military checkpoints.
Israeli military sources said a booby-trapped jeep painted the same color as army vehicles and apparently on a mission to ram the Kfar Darom settlement exploded when troops opened fire on the vehicle.
Four soldiers traveling in a car just behind the jeep were wounded by the blast, two of them seriously, the sources added.
Fighters of the Ezzedin Al-Qassam Brigades — Hamas’s armed wing — identified the dead attacker as Tareq Hmeid, 23, through loudspeakers in the nearby Nusseirat refugee camp.
Israeli military sources also said a deep four-kilometer-long trench would be built along the border between the southern Gaza Strip and Egypt before troops complete the pullout.
The trench will be aimed at preventing radical Palestinian groups from stockpiling weapons smuggled from Egypt through cross-border tunnels after an Israeli withdrawal, the sources said.
A Palestinian suspected of collaborating with Israel was shot dead by four masked gunmen in Gaza City yesterday, medical sources and witnesses said.
The victim, who was not immediately identified, was gunned down in Gaza’s eastern Al-Zeitun quarter. No one claimed responsibility for the killing.
Hamas said yesterday that the Palestinian Authority should have sole responsibility for dealing with Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.
Hamas believes informants enabled Israel to assassinate the group’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, in March and his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, earlier this month.
“The Palestinian Authority should implement law and order and arrest those collaborators,” Sami Abu Zohri, a local Hamas leader, said after participating in a meeting on the issue of collaborators.
Meanwhile, Israeli border guards briefly arrested leading Palestinian dove Sari Nusseibeh yesterday morning in occupied and annexed East Jerusalem for allegedly employing illegal workers.
“I was released after committing myself to paying a fine of 10,000 shekels ($2,200) if I don’t show up at a possible trial,” Nusseibeh said after his four-hour questioning.
He said he was questioned about Palestinians from the West Bank without Israeli entry permits employed at the university, and stressed the incident had no political undertones.
Nusseibeh, a well-known intellectual from a leading Jerusalem family, co-launched a peace plan in July 2002 together with Ami Ayalon, the former chief of Israel’s Shin Beth domestic security service.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon personally called a string of officials in his Likud Party yesterday and told them he considered an upcoming party referendum on his proposal to withdraw from the Gaza Strip a personal vote of confidence.
Sharon has proposed a raft of unilateral measures to “disengage” from the Palestinians, including withdrawing from most of the Gaza Strip in 2005.
But the dismantling of all 21 Jewish settlements in the territory and the evacuation of its estimated 7,500 residents has been met with fierce opposition by some leading members of Israel’s ruling coalition.
Opponents of the pullout plan have campaigned for weeks throughout the country, but Sharon has only recently countered them with a last-minute push, as polls showed the race tightening ahead of the Sunday vote.
