BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip, 5 January 2005 — Moderate Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas called Israel “the Zionist enemy” for the first time yesterday after an Israeli tank killed seven Palestinian youths in a Gaza strawberry field.
Abbas spoke during campaigning to be elected Yasser Arafat’s successor in which he has tried to win over militants defying his agenda of a cease-fire and peace talks in pursuit of a Palestinian state in Israeli-occupied territories.
But while Abbas later repeated criticism of militant violence as counterproductive, his resort to language used by radicals sworn to Israel’s destruction was certain to stir doubt about the scope for a diplomatic breakthrough.
The Israeli Army said it had targeted militants who had crept into the strawberry field and fired mortar bombs into a nearby Jewish settlement in the north of the occupied territory. Palestinian witnesses and medics in the village of Beit Lahiya said the militants had fled by the time the tank shell crashed and all the dead were youths aged 11-17 from two farming families. Fifteen people were wounded, several critically.
The field, where the youths had been harvesting strawberries, was spattered with blood and body parts. Thousands of people joined a funeral march for the seven later yesterday.
Word of the incident clearly angered Abbas, widely tipped to win the presidential election, as he continued campaigning in Gaza despite further fighting in the small coastal strip between Israeli forces and militants waging a four-year-old revolt.
“We are praying for the souls of our martyrs who fell today to the shells of the Zionist enemy,” Abbas told a rally in the south Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis, a hotbed of militants.
It was his first known use of a phrase favored by Islamic militants. Abbas, 69, long known as a pragmatic Palestinian nationalist, has revived peace hopes since Arafat’s death by condemning militant violence in favor of talks with Israel.
Abbas later tried to visit the wounded in a Beit Lahiya hospital but drove away without getting out of his car because of tank bursts nearby in response to a rocket volley by militants into Israel, which caused no casualties.
“This will not bring peace for anyone. If such aggression continues we will not be able to engage in a peace process,” Abbas told reporters, referring to the killing of the youths. Israel says it is trying to stop intensifying mortar and rocket fire by roving bands of Gaza militants who have spurned Abbas’s call for restraint.
“But I also condemn all pointless (mortar and rocket) actions happening here and there,” Abbas said. “These actions are wrong and I will not apologize for (saying) that.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom criticized a recent sharpening in Abbas’ statements, in which he has praised militants as “freedom fighters”.
“We are very disappointed with the last statements made by (Abbas). I don’t think this is the way to move together to solve our conflict,” Shalom told reporters in Jerusalem.
But Health Minister Danny Naveh played it down as electioneering. “I hope these statements made on the eve of elections do not mean anything with respect to what we can expect later, because in the end we all expect to see a Palestinian leadership that changes direction,” he said.
To forge peace Abbas must gain broad domestic stature hitherto held only by Arafat. Abbas is the heavy favorite to win but only because uprising leader Marwan Barghouthi, jailed for life in Israel, did not run.
