JENIN, West Bank, 24 December 2002 — Two Palestinians were gunned down yesterday by an undercover Israeli special forces unit in the northern West Bank village of Burkin, near Jenin, Palestinian security sources said.
Chamal Hassan Soboh, 27, of the Hamas, and Mustafa Jallal Kach, 28, from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah political movement, were stopped by the soldiers while crossing a field in a tractor, they said. They were then shot dead, the security sources said. Soboh’s home near Burkin was blown up by troops two months ago.
In Moscow, Israeli Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out yesterday the prospect of an independent Palestinian state possessing an army and called for the concept of unlimited national sovereignty to be reconsidered.
Asked about the progress of talks on the Middle East, Netanyahu, who had just spoken with his Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov, said that “no one in Israel will accept that a Palestinian state will remain a militarized territory.”
In Jericho, the army arrested a wanted member of Islamic Jihad in an overnight raid. Around 30 Israeli soldiers in jeeps made the incursion into the oasis town in the Jordan Valley to seize Tawfiq Al-Zubin, 34, who escaped from an Israeli prison in 1997, the Palestinian security officials said. A fellow member of Jihad was killed during that jailbreak, they said.
In Nablus, the major city in the northern West Bank which is also under occupation, Israeli troops surrounded a 15-story building and arrested Mohammed Hashash, 30, a top member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
In another development, Israel’s Construction Ministry has invited tenders to build 232 new housing units in a West Bank Jewish settlement near Nablus, a ministry spokesman said.
In an article published Friday in London’s Jewish Chronicle during a visit to Britain by Israeli Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw branded the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories “inexplicable” and “illegal under international law.”
