OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 9 March — In a virtual blood bath, Israeli soldiers yesterday killed 37 Palestinians in daylong raids on towns and refugee camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day ever in the current intifada or uprising against Israeli occupation.
Under pressure from the United States, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that truce talks with the Palestinians would take place “under fire”, apparently backing down on his demand for a prior seven-day period of calm.
“I thought we could reach a period of respite before a cease-fire,” Sharon told Israel’s second television channel. “But this is a war situation we are experiencing. The negotiations for a cease-fire will take place under fire,” the premier was quoted as saying by the television, which stressed Sharon was going back on his condition for a week of total calm.
Israel’s air, land and sea assaults on Palestinian-controlled areas followed Washington’s surprise announcement on Thursday that it was sending its Middle East envoy back to the region to reactivate long-dormant US peacemaking efforts.
With yesterday’s deaths, the Palestinian toll in the uprising broke through the 1,000-mark. A general, a nine-year-old boy, a hospital administrator and an ambulance worker were among the Palestinian dead.
A Palestinian killed five Israelis overnight in a settlement in the Gaza Strip, drawing a punishing Israeli sweep through a village. An Israeli soldier was also killed in fighting in the Tulkarm refugee camp in the West Bank.
With violence escalating by the hour, the United States called for immediate implementation of an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan agreed to last year, even before Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni begins a new mission there next week. A US official said the Bush administration wanted to see action on the ground “as quickly as possible,” not necessarily after the seven-day period of calm demanded by Israel.
“Zinni’s goal is to get the parties to implement the Tenet security work plan steps immediately, to get them to take steps even before he gets there,” US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher added at a daily briefing.
The Tenet plan, drafted by CIA Director George Tenet earlier the same month, has never been officially released. But leaked texts say that Israel and the Palestinian Authority should immediately resume security cooperation, enforce a cease-fire, exchange information on threats and start work on a plan to redeploy Israeli forces.
In the first week, it does not require Israel to make any steps that it would be reluctant to do, such as moving its forces back or easing the restrictions on the movements of Palestinians — a major Palestinian grievance.
Following a strategy charted by Sharon to hit the Palestinians hard until they sue for peace, the Israeli Army sent troops and tanks backed by helicopters into Bethlehem.
Seven Palestinians, including a hospital director shot in the head while driving to work, were killed and scores wounded in heavy fighting in towns and refugee camps bordering the Palestinian-ruled city, in the West Bank.
Tanks advanced to positions just inside the ancient city before dawn, raising fears among residents of a return to the street battles that raged during a 10-day incursion in October.
In the southern Gaza Strip, Israeli forces on a search for Palestinian activists and munitions in the village of Khuza’a killed 17 Palestinians, including Maj. Gen. Ahmed Mefrej, chief of the Palestinian National Security Forces in the area.
Mefrej was the most senior Palestinian commander killed since the uprising began. Colleagues said he was shot helping to defend the village from the Israeli military raid. The villagers buried their dead to angry chants of “blood for blood, killing for killing” from a crowd of 50,000 mourners.
The army entered Khuza’a after a Hamas member infiltrated the heavily guarded Atzmona Jewish settlement. He killed five Israelis and wounded more than 20 others before soldiers shot him dead.
Later, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at the offices where Mefrej worked and at least two other targets in Gaza.
The army also reported missile strikes on two security targets near the West Bank city of Hebron. Witnesses said one strike hit a power installation, cutting electricity to Hebron.
In Tulkarm refugee camp in the West Bank, Israeli forces killed six Palestinians, including the nine-year-old boy. A Palestinian stone-thrower was killed in the town of Jenin.
Palestinian sources at Tulkarm refugee camp said Israeli troops were moving through the streets with dogs and calling on men over 18 years old to report to a United Nations school.
Four other Palestinians were killed when Israeli gunboats attacked a Palestinian police station in northern Gaza, among them an ambulance worker trying to reach the wounded.
Jewish settlers took advantage of the situation. Dozens of armed settlers rampaged in a West Bank village, injuring four Palestinians and damaging the local mosque and clinic, residents said. Settlers entered the village in about 25 vehicles and began firing randomly at Palestinian homes and buildings in the village of Huwara, south of Nablus.
The incident raised the specter of vigilante action against Palestinians by the settlers who have in the past set fire to Palestinian houses and destroyed fields to avenge attacks against fellow settlers.
Israeli police are already investigating the possibility that Jewish vigilantes may have planted a bomb outside an Arab school on the outskirts of Jerusalem on Monday which slightly injured a teacher and seven pupils.
Nabil Abu Rudainah, an aide to Yasser Arafat, said the Palestinian leader briefed US Secretary of State Colin Powell in a telephone call on “the massacres conducted by Israel against our people” and urged immediate US intervention.
The International Committee of the Red Cross voiced growing alarm at the killing of Palestinian ambulance workers by Israeli forces. Expressing what he called “outrage” at the deaths, ICRC official Rene Kosirnik urged both sides and “first and foremost the Israeli armed forces” to respect the safety of medical personnel under international humanitarian law.
“If there is one category that should be respected in all circumstances and its work facilitated, it is medical work and more specifically the emergency medical evacuation,” Kosirnik told a news conference in Ramallah.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society, two of whose staff were among this week’s dead, has accused Israeli forces of targeting ambulances as they rush to recover wounded gunmen and civilians in the fighting.
