OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 1 September — Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer yesterday justified his government’s policy of assassinating Palestinians as the Israeli Army made a major incursion into two Palestinian areas of the divided West Bank city of Hebron yesterday evening, witnesses told AFP.
Israeli soldiers backed by tanks took up positions in the Hart El-Sheikh and Bab El-Zawia quarters of this flash point city following hours of intermittent gunbattles.
The Israeli minister told the Maariv newspaper Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was not on the hit list. “I will not give my green light to an operation targeting Arafat,” he said .
“There are people, like Arafat for example, who should not be harmed, because it wouldn’t serve any purpose, and could on the contrary have a boomerang effect”, the Labor hawk added. He vowed to continue military operations against Palestinians allegedly planning attacks against Israeli occupation.
Since the intifada erupted 11 months ago, Israel has assassinated more than 50 Palestinian activists.
On Monday, Israel assassinated Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of one of the three main components of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in the highest-level hit by the army since the wave of violence started in September last year, and the first one against the national leader of a political movement.
Palestinian officials have voiced concern that the criteria for the Israeli killings could make every Palestinian a potential target.
They say Israel’s deliberate killing of more than 60 activists since the uprising against its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip erupted last September has fueled the bloodshed in which 547 Palestinians have died.
In Gaza Strip, a Palestinian leader escaped an apparent Israeli assassination bid early yesterday, with overall tensions further fueled by another Israeli Army incursion in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli troops fired missiles at the home of Qais Abdel Karim, the head of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) for the West Bank, a DFLP spokesman in Gaza City told AFP.
But Abdel Karim, better known as Abu Leila, was not in the house in Ramallah in the West Bank. The spokesman called the attack a new assassination attempt by Israel. Abu Leila is a leader of the Damascus-based DFLP, which claimed a raid on an army outpost in the Gaza Strip last Saturday that left two Israeli soldiers and a medic dead.
“This new aggression by (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon ... won’t stop us”, he told AFP, vowing to “retaliate by escalating the intifada.” At almost the same time as the missile attack, Israel sent tanks and bulldozers into Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, in one of two incursions earlier in the day That sparked heavy exchanges of gunfire in the autonomous Palestinian section of Rafah. Ten Palestinians were wounded, two of them seriously, Palestinian security sources told AFP.
A Palestinian security position and nine houses were destroyed and 10 others damaged during that incursion, which followed a smaller one in the central Gaza Strip near a crossing point into Israel.
Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, spoke with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on phone and discussed the escalating Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, SPA said. Mubarak also telephoned his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad and discussed the situation in the Middle East. Their conversation focused on “the developing situation in the region and efforts to contain the situation in the occupied territories, as well as a number of other matters of mutual interest.”
Israel and Egypt have reportedly stepped up contacts in order to prepare a meeting between Arafat and Peres. Israeli radio said the meeting could be held in Erez next week, on the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Talks are under way to arrange a meeting between Arafat and Peres, a Palestinian official said yesterday on the sidelines of a UN conference on racism. But diplomatic prospects for a resolution to the conflict were dampened yesterday, when the Palestinian ambassador in Moscow reckoned that Sharon’s scheduled visit to Russia next week was unlikely to contribute to a settlement.
In Beirut, Hezbollah said its anti-aircraft batteries fired on Israeli warplanes violating Lebanese airspace yesterday for the second day in a row.
Hezbollah said its units opened fire “at 1:10 p.m. (1010 GMT) on enemy planes after they violated Lebanese sovereignty over the southern town of Marjayoun.”
