OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 20 November 2002 — Israeli troops shot dead five Palestinians, including a teenager and a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, yesterday as a Palestinian official indicated legislative and presidential elections scheduled for January 2003 will not be held due to Israeli reoccupation of most of the West Bank.
Witnesses said tanks rolled into the eastern part of Tulkarm in pursuit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades member Tareq Mohammed Zaghal and after a brief encounter killed him and four others.
Israeli machine gun fire killed Zaghal as well as a 13-year-old boy, a civilian security guard and two other locals who were passing in a car, the witnesses said. Fifteen other Palestinians were wounded.
In Ramallah, a Palestinian official said elections will not be held as scheduled since necessary preparations have been stalled by the Israeli Army’s continued reoccupation of the West Bank.
“The central electoral committee will not be able to prepare election lists, guarantee electoral campaigns and organize a free vote, if the reoccupation, the blockade and the restrictions on the Palestinians’ movements continue,” said committee head Ali Jarbawi.
According to sources close to Arafat’s office, the European Union — which has sponsored the electoral process — advised the Palestinian Authority to call the elections off. “Several conditions should be met before elections can be held, including the setting up of a new electoral system that would lay the foundations of a state,” says Sakher Habash, a leader of Arafat’s Fatah movement.
In Paris, French Foreign Ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau told a media conference the extension of Israeli settlements in the West Bank town of Hebron was against international law.
“Any territorial change must come about through negotiation between the parties and not from a unilateral decision,” he said.
If carried out, the corridors between the settlements would cut up the city and “risk leading to an unacceptable displacement of the population,” he said.
In Cairo, Egypt’s foreign minister called for the European Union and United States to take a firm stand to halt Israeli “aggression” against the Palestinians, in talks yesterday with the EU envoy to the Middle East Miguel Angel Moratinos.
In another development, Amram Mitzna, mayor of Haifa, won the Labour primaries by a wide margin yesterday to lead his party into Israel’s general elections in January, an exit poll showed. Mitzna vowed to dismantle Jewish settlements in the occupied Gaza Strip if he became the prime minister.
