GAZA CITY, 6 May 2004 — Violence rumbled on in the occupied territories yesterday, as Israeli troops shot dead a senior Hamas fighter north of the West Bank city of Nablus and an army incursion into the Gaza Strip left a Palestinian dead and several wounded.
The killings came as Palestinians said Israel had freed another top Hamas figure, Mohammed Taha, in the Gaza Strip after he spent 14 months in prison.
An Israeli unit “on operational duty north of Nablus saw an armed terrorist and opened fire and killed him”, and then safely detonated a bomb that had been planted nearby, near the village of Talousa, an Israeli source said.
The man was identified as a senior Hamas figure in the area, though his name was not immediately divulged.
Palestinian officials had no immediate comment on the shooting which was reported shortly after Taha, a founder of Hamas, was released to his home in central Gaza.
Taha, 68, stepped out of a van outside his home in the Bureij camp. Jubilant supporters hoisted Taha, who had grown a long, white beard, onto their shoulders.
Hamas activists, some firing assault rifles into the air, poured into the streets, while the loudspeakers of local mosques blared out calls to “come and join the celebration.”
Taha was arrested in March last year during an army raid into Bureij, along with his five sons, all Hamas activists. Three were subsequently freed, but one, Yasser, was later killed with his wife and two-year-old daughter in an Israeli missile attack on their car.
The military had no comment on the elder Taha’s release yesterday. Taha was the highest ranking Hamas figure to be arrested at the time, though he was said to be no longer involved in Hamas affairs.
Israeli troops continued their operations in the Gaza Strip and conducted a raid into the central town of Deir Al-Balah.
A 35-year-old civilian was killed by an Israeli bullet when soldiers opened fire on a group of stone-throwing youths, Palestinian medical sources and witnesses said.
Fifteen other Palestinians were wounded in the incident, including Gaza-based AFP photographer Mahmud Hams, the sources said. Hams sustained leg injuries, which were not thought to be serious.
Witnesses stressed that no armed Palestinians were in the area at the time and the army said it was looking into the circumstances of the incident.
An Israeli military court indicted a 15-year-old Palestinian boy on charges of recruiting teenagers to become suicide bombers, then helping prepare them for missions to kill Israelis.
The court said on Tuesday that Nasser Awartani was the key contact between the youth of the West Bank city of Nablus and two militant groups, that he personally recruited a 16-year-old who blew himself up at a military checkpoint last year and another who was caught with a bomb strapped to his body.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon struggled yesterday to defuse the political crisis sparked by Likud’s rejection of his Gaza pullout plan, just as it won support from the “quartet” of Middle East peace sponsors.
Sharon was testing the waters with a scaled-down proposal for dismantling three isolated Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, instead of all 21, and two in the West Bank instead of four.
He met Tuesday with a string of Israeli officials to ponder his options after his own party crushingly defeated his “disengagement” plan during an internal referendum two days earlier.
Sharon insisted he would press on with the plan, even in a watered-down version, but he still faces an uphill struggle to garner the necessary support in Parliament and in his Cabinet, amid threats of a Likud revolt if he tries to force his plan through.
Despite their opposition to Sharon’s methods, members of the international quartet meeting in New York on Tuesday encouraged the premier to implement the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip as promised to Washington.
“The quartet welcomes and encourages such a step, which should provide a rare moment of opportunity in the search for peace in the Middle East,” said a statement from the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia.
The quartet “has finally understood that Israel is for the first time ready to evacuate the settlements and that it is possible to move forward,” was the reaction from a senior official in Sharon’s office.
But the quartet statement was also seen as a way of breathing new life into the roadmap, which Sharon recently declared dead, and suggested that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza should be complete.
As proposed by Sharon, the plan stipulates Israel retaining control over the Gaza Strip’s airspace, territorial waters and borders.
But Sharon’s Gaza pullout plan was barely alive yesterday, as Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz admitted that the construction of a barrier to protect Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip was being considered.
As Israel’s Labor-led opposition pushed for early elections, Sharon came under further attack from a Labor MP whose bill for an indicted prime minister to step down within 30 days was narrowly rejected in Parliament.
Sharon has been suspected of accepting bribes from an Israeli contractor in exchange for his help in securing a huge property deal in Greece, but an interim report on the investigation recently leaked to the press suggested the premier would not be indicted.
(Additional input from agencies)
