NABLUS, West Bank, 26 July — Israel tracked and killed a Hamas activist yesterday in an attack that turned his car into mangled metal and prompted swift calls for revenge.
Medical workers collected pieces of Salah Darwaza’s body from the vehicle near the Al-Ayn refugee camp close to the Palestinian-controlled West Bank city of Nablus. Palestinian witnesses said it appeared four rockets or tank shells hit the car.
The Israeli Army said it carried out the attack, the latest in Israel’s declared policy of “targeted killings” of Palestinians. Palestinians say Israel has assassinated more than 40 activists in 10 months of bloodshed.
Hundreds of shocked Palestinians gathered around the charred wreckage of his car, some calling for revenge. “This crime will not pass without punishment,” vowed Jamal Salim, a Hamas leader in the Nablus area.
In the Gaza Strip, bullets flew after a group of about 20 settlers from the settlement of Morag opened fire on a Palestinian security checkpoint and houses in the town of Rafah, a Palestinian security source said.
Palestinians retaliated, firing on the settlers, and Israeli soldiers then intervened, the Palestinian source said. A soldier and a settler were wounded.
The Israeli Army then sent two bulldozers and a pair of tanks to level a nearby Palestinian post and petrol station, witnesses said. A Palestinian policemen was shot in the hand during the demolition.
The Nablus killing coincided with a visit to the region by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who met Palestinian Yasser Arafat in the Gaza Strip yesterday after talks with Israeli leaders the previous day.
“This is a dangerous escalation and an attempt to kill or undermine the international efforts aimed at containing the Israeli aggression,” Jibril Rajoub, Palestinian Preventive Security chief in the West Bank, said of the attack on Darwaza.
The United States has criticized Israel’s “targeted killings”, saying the policy escalates violence at a time when the world community is trying to encourage Israel and the Palestinians to implement a US-brokered truce.
On Tuesday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said that sending only US nationals to the Middle East to monitor the application of the Mitchell report would not be a problem. “The nationality of the observers is not a great problem, even if they are all of the same nationality, and if they are only American. What is important is that they arrive on the ground and observe,” Maher told journalists after meeting French President Jacques Chirac in Cairo.
Meanwhile, right-wing Jews announced plans yesterday to disguise themselves as Arabs and pray in Jerusalem’s Al-Haram Al-Sharif. “We are going to send, in the next few weeks, Jews who will be dressed like Muslims and they’ll go” to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Baruch Marzel, a member of the outlawed anti-Arab Kach movement, told Reuters. “We’re going to do it systematically.”
