OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 5 March — The Palestinian intifada (uprising) death toll was set to rise further as the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said the Palestinians should “suffer many losses”, after Israeli troops yesterday killed at least 19 Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza Strip in response to alleged earlier attacks.
“The Palestinians should be hit very hard,” Sharon told reporters as he was leaving Parliament, “because if they don’t feel they have been defeated, it will be impossible to return to the negotiating table.” “They should suffer many losses,” he added. “Whoever wants to negotiate with them, should hit them hard first, so that they understand that they will not get anything through terrorism.”
Israeli forces raided refugee camps, blew up a car carrying a Palestinian family and opened fire on an ambulance yesterday. The latest spasm of violence followed Israel’s pledge to “put the brakes on Palestinian terror” after a weekend of violencein which 22 Israelis were killed and international peace efforts were thrown deeper into doubt.
In the worst single incident yesterday a family of six, a woman, two children and three teenagers, died after Israeli tanks fired on two cars in the Al-Amari refugee camp in the West Bank town of Ramallah. The dead were the wife and three children of a local official of the Hamas resistance movement, and two other youths. The Islamist group charged it was a botched extrajudicial killing.
The Israeli Army apologized for the attack, saying the shell was aimed at a car carrying Palestinian policemen, but missed its target and stressed that the attack was not an assassination attempt.
In the Jenin refugee camp, the toll included a Palestinian doctor killed when Israeli troops opened fire on the ambulance he was traveling in. The army said he threatened to run the soldiers over.
Another Palestinian, who ran the Jenin branch of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, allegedly responsible for a string of recent anti-Israeli attacks, was also shot dead by Israeli soldiers. One Palestinian also died when his house collapsed on him after being hit by a tank shell, another was shot during clashes at the camp’s western entrance, and a 60-year-old woman and 42-year-old man were killed by gunfire in the Jenin refugee camp.
Three Palestinians were killed late Sunday night during an Israeli incursion into the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian security sources said. Some 6,000 Palestinians attended their funeral in the afternoon. Another Palestinian was shot dead at an army checkpoint near Nablus, and two more were found dead in the village of Tammoun.
Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a building in Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s headquarters compound in Ramallah and F-16 warplanes flattened a security headquarters in Bethlehem last night. Tanks also raided a West Bank refugee camp.
At least three people were hurt in the F-16 raid that destroyed the four-story security headquarters in Bethlehem, hospital officials said. In Gaza City, witnesses said an Israeli gunboat fired a missile at Arafat’s seaside headquarters but it exploded on the beach.
Israel’s decision to turn up the heat brought warnings from the Palestinian Authority officials. Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo warned it would only end in more bloodletting on both sides, and Cabinet Secretary Abdel Rahman said “resistance” groups would punish Israel’s “crimes”.
“These crimes will not remain unpunished. Palestinian resistance will retaliate for the crimes of the Israeli government,” he told reporters. “The response to escalation will be escalation.”
Israel’s security Cabinet decided late Sunday to “exert ongoing pressure on the Palestinian Authority and terror organizations,” which a prime ministerial aide said would involve more airstrikes and operations similar to last week’s refugee camp raids which left more than 20 Palestinians and two soldiers dead. The action would focus on local militias and especially the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, responsible for Sunday’s blast, he added.
