GAZA CITY, 1 December 2002 — A 16-year-old Palestinian was killed yesterday by Israeli gunfire in Gaza City as troops claimed they arrested a long-sought commander of a group linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat after it announced it mounted an attack on an Israeli polling booth that killed six people.
Hatem Al-Ajla was struck in the back by bullets, but no details were given on the circumstances of his death while the arrest of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades commander Majid Al-Masri near the West Bank city of Nablus followed a renewed pledge by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to hunt down those responsible for attacks on Israelis at home and abroad.
The attack by the Brigades, an offshoot of Arafat’s Fatah movement, on the polling station in the northern Israeli town of Beit Shean was carried out on Thursday, hours after the bomb and missile attacks in Kenya that left three Israelis and nine Kenyans dead.
Palestinian sources said troops caught Masri, the Brigades leader in Nablus and other northern West Bank cities, and his assistant in a safe house. “He told me by telephone that the Israelis were breaking down his door and then the line went dead,” a Brigades source told Reuters.
Meanwhile, dozens of Israeli Army tanks, armored vehicles and bulldozers, supported by Apache helicopters, raided the northern Gaza Strip late Saturday, Palestinian witnesses said.
On the diplomatic front, Israel faced a new row with the United Nations over a demand that Israeli troops be punished for killing a UN worker during a clash with gunmen last week.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote to Sharon saying he “expected Israel to carry out a rigorous investigation of the incident, share its results with the United Nations and hold accountable those responsible”, a UN spokesman said on Friday.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday that a probe into British aid worker Iain Hook’s killing in the West Bank city of Jenin was likely to end within the next few days.
