RAFAH, Gaza Strip, 13 August 2004 — Israeli Army bulldozers demolished 15 houses in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah near the Egyptian border early yesterday, Palestinian security sources said. Residents also reported that a building was badly destroyed when an Israeli helicopter fired two rockets late Wednesday.
A group of around 15 locals who have lost their homes in the Rafah destructions in recent days staged a protest at the local governor’s office yesterday demanding a greater effort to rehouse them.
The United Nations’ agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA has said a total of nearly 1,500 houses have been destroyed in the Rafah region since the September 2000 start of the Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation.
Israeli helicopters also fired two rockets at an open spot in the town, shortly after the operation began, to deter militants from approaching the force entering in the town. The army bulldozers, accompanied by about 20 tanks and armored vehicles, had rolled into Rafah at around midnight Wednesday.
The demolished houses were located in the southern Shou’ot neighborhood, adjacent to the Israeli-controlled buffer zone separating Rafah from the Egyptian border. Palestinians said the demolitions were part of Israel’s plan to widen the buffer zone.
On Wednesday, the European Union allocated 1.35 million euros to Palestinians whose homes were destroyed by Israeli Army operations in Rafah during May and June this year. The European Commission said that Israeli house demolitions had made 15,000 Rafah resident homeless in the four years since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000.
In the West Bank meanwhile, Palestinian Premier Ahmed Qorei condemned Wednesday’s bomb attack at an Israeli Army checkpoint at the northern entrance to Jerusalem. “These kind of things are not in the Palestinian interest and we condemn them,” he told reporters yesterday in the East Jerusalem suburb of Abu Dis, after a meeting with United States congressmen.
The raid further heightened tensions in the region following a bombing on Wednesday at the Qalandiya checkpoint in the West Bank that killed two Palestinians and injured 19 people, including Palestinian civilians and Israeli border police.
Late on Wednesday, Israeli armored forces sealed off the northern West Bank town of Jenin, the home base of the Al-Aqsa cell that dispatched the bomber, and residents braced for a possible military assault. Without hours of the West Bank attack, Israeli forces went into action in Rafah sending in about 20 tanks and several bulldozers.
Meanwhile, Israel plans a new test of its Arrow II missile-killer to boost the system’s speed and accuracy in the face of mounting ballistic threats from arch-foe Iran, Israeli defense sources said yesterday.
The Arrow II passed its first live test in July by downing a Scud missile off the coast of California. Now Israel seeks to pit it against a threat more closely resembling Iran’s upgraded Shahab-3, which Tehran said it successfully tested on Wednesday. “We will put the Arrow through another live run in the near future, pushing the envelope on all its capabilities,” a senior defense source said, without elaborating.
