GAZA, 9 December 2002 — Israeli troops killed a Palestinian mother yesterday and wounded three of her children as they walked through a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian hospital officials and witnesses said.
Nahla Aqel, 41, was killed in the street on her way to visiting neighbors for an Eid Al-Fitr holiday meal when troops opened fire with machine guns from a tank near the Jewish settlement of Rafah.
The Palestinian leadership reacted in anger, slamming the death as another example of Israel’s “state terrorism.” In a separate incident, two other Palestinians were wounded by Israeli gunfire in Rafah, sources said.
Earlier, under cover of heavy shooting, Israeli tanks and bulldozers moved around the refugee camp in Gaza where 10 Palestinians were killed in raids two days ago. Two Palestinian boys were slightly injured.
Two tanks and a bulldozer were raiding a farm in Deir Al-Balah, not far from Bureij, the sources said. Officials at Al-Aqsa hospital said they were treating two Palestinian boys for minor gunshot wounds.
At the same time, seven tanks and two bulldozers moved into farming areas of the Bureij camp, security sources and witnesses said. No injuries were reported in that lightly populated area.
Israeli military officials said they had no information about tanks entering either location.
In an escalation of tension on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, two soldiers were injured, one seriously, when their armored personnel carrier ran over a bomb yesterday while patrolling a security fence near Zarit.
Also yesterday, five wanted Palestinians were arrested in the West Bank, four in Nablus and one in Sebastia, the army spokesman’s office said. No details were released.
Palestinians reacted angrily to the setting up of a seemingly permanent army roadblock on the only open road linking the eastern and western halves of Nablus, the largest Palestinian city. The concrete roadblock was installed over the weekend, with the metal gate closed during curfews.
Meanwhile, talks aimed at stopping “all operations against Israeli civilians” will resume within days between the Hamas and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, a Palestinian official said yesterday.
“We are planning to have a meeting with Hamas in Gaza as soon as possible and talks in Cairo will take place next week at the most,” Minister for Planning and International Cooperation Nabil Shaath told AFP.
“We will maintain our demands, namely a halt to all operations against civilians as a first step toward a cease-fire to allow Israel to pull back its forces from the territories to the Sept. 28, 2000 lines,” before the Palestinian uprising erupted, he said.
Shaath said civilians meant all unarmed and innocent Israelis, including unarmed settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Shaath said the talks would also focus on “securing a commitment from Hamas to creating an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital within the 1967 borders only.”
Hamas officially rejects the very existence of the state of Israel, although the group had previously said it would consider a temporary truce with the Jewish state in exchange for its full withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Cease-fire talks between Fatah and Hamas were held last month in Cairo, but yielded no result except a commitment from both sides to continue their dialogue.
Shaath said he was optimistic for the next round of talks: “I had a meeting a few weeks ago in Damascus with Khaled Meshaal — Hamas’ political chief in exile — and felt quite optimistic we could reach an agreement.”
