JENIN, West Bank, 4 November 2005 — Clashes in the West Bank yesterday left a Palestinian boy critically wounded by Israeli gunfire despite a call for calm from Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas at the start of Muslim holidays.
Under intense pressure from Israel and Washington to disarm militant groups and stop their attacks, Abbas delivered his appeal on the first day of the Eid Al-Fitr feast.
“The situation should be calm and all these clashes that have erupted here and there should stop,” Abbas told reporters after prayers in Gaza City.
In the worst flare up following Israel’s historic pullout from the Gaza Strip in September, 14 Palestinians and six Israelis have been killed in Middle East violence since an Oct. 26 suicide bombing.
The Gaza withdrawal had sparked hopes from the international community of a genuine breakthrough in the peace process, but continued violence has seen Hamas threaten not to renew an informal truce at the year-end.
A 12-year-old Palestinian boy was in a critical condition in Israel after he was shot in the head and abdomen by Israeli troops confusing his toy gun for a real rifle during clashes in the northern West Bank town of Jenin.
“Soldiers identified him as an armed man and shot him. After he was evacuated they found a gun that turned out to be made of plastic,” an army spokesman said.
Gunbattles between Israeli troops and gunmen from Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, loosely linked to Abbas’ ruling Fatah group, flared after more than 30 army jeeps moved into Jenin shadowed by two helicopters. The operation targeting Palestinians comes as part of ongoing operations in the wake of last week’s suicide bombing. Seventeen suspected fighters were earlier arrested in the West Bank overnight.
Jenin has been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting over the five years of the intifada. Fifty-four Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed during clashes in the city in April 2002.
In Israel, a soldier was lightly wounded when fighters in the Gaza Strip fired a mortar shell across the border. The Israeli military responded by firing artillery into the Palestinian territory. Israel has kept up intense pressure on the moderate Abbas to forcibly disarm militants, who have repeatedly flouted demands from the Palestinian leader to lay down their weapons following Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
In Washington, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz pressed home the insistence that militant groups be disarmed. “The first phase of the road map says the Palestinians should dismantle the terror groups,” he said after talks with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, referring to the largely moribund peace plan.
