JENIN, West Bank, 1 September — Israeli helicopter gunships ambushed a car in the West Bank yesterday, killing a Palestinian activist and four children with a double missile strike, Palestinian witnesses and medical officials said. They said two Apache helicopters struck at Tubas village near Jenin in the afternoon, one missile obliterating the car and its three passengers — an activist linked to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement and two teenagers, neither of them combatants.
Another missile struck a nearby house, killing a nine-year-old boy and a 10-year old girl and wounding seven other people. “What is the sense of hitting a building with no militants or wanted men inside, only civilians?” Tubas Mayor Diab Abu Khezaran told reporters.
The attack shattered the weekend calm at the village, the hubbub confusing early reports on the casualties. Witnesses had initially identified four dead activists, and then three dead activists and two children, medical officials said, because the bodies were too charred to be properly identified.
In another development, EU foreign ministers gave “widespread support” yesterday for a Mideast peace plan notably seeking a Palestinian state by 2005, based on ideas by the EU, the US and Saudi Arabia, a spokesman said. Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, whose country currently holds the EU presidency, will travel to the Middle East from tomorrow to present the plan to regional leaders, said the spokesman in the Danish town of Elsinore.
“There was widespread support for the road map,” said the official, adding that Moeller will travel this coming week to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian territories, where he will meet Arafat.
The three-stage plan will then be taken to a meeting of the Quartet — the United States, the EU, Russia and the UN — scheduled in New York on Sept. 16. “A number of ministers stressed that the Israeli-Arab conflict contributes to fueling some of the terrorist activities,” added the official, speaking during a break in talks by foreign ministers. “Ministers stressed the need for Europeans to remain active,” he said, adding “We hope that it will be adopted as a quartet road map” at the New York meeting.
Meanwhile, a leading Palestinian Authority minister dismissed yesterday US envoy David Satterfield’s mission to the region as a “public relations exercise” prior to his own meeting with the US official. “Until now the talks with Satterfield have not given anything and they amount to a public relations exercise,” International Cooperation Minister Nabil Shaath said.
Satterfield, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, also held talks yesterday with Palestinian Interior Minister Abdel Razaq Al-Yahya. Satterfield is due later to meet with Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, Palestinian officials told reporters. (The Independent)
