HEBRON, West Bank, 29 December 2002 — Israeli troops destroyed two homes of Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron yesterday and killed a nine-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza Strip.
The army said it razed the homes of two wanted Palestinians on the outskirts of Hebron yesterday. Palestinian witnesses said one of the homes belonged to a member of the Al-Aqsa Brigades, a group affiliated with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, and the second was owned by an Islamic Jihad member.
Arafat has called for an end to bombings, but describes raids on Jewish settlers as “self-defense” because armed settlers have attacked Palestinians.
Palestinians and human rights groups denounce house demolitions as collective punishment.
In Ramallah, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said: “We have seen recently a number of developments which indicate that Sharon wants to destroy the Palestinian Authority, sabotage cease-fire talks in Cairo and rebuild the civil administration in the Palestinian territories.”
A nine-year-old Palestinian girl was shot dead yesterday by Israeli troops in the Khan Younis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical and security officials said.
Hanin Abu Suleiman was hit in the head by a bullet fired from an Israeli position close to the Gush Katif settlement bloc as she stood outside her house, the sources said.
In Bethlehem, Israeli troops clashed with Palestinian students in front of the university responding to stone-throwing with tear gas grenades. The violence erupted when an army jeep and another from the border police took position in front of the southern West Bank town’s campus, an AFP correspondent on the scene said.
Some of the hundreds of students attending classes inside the compound started throwing stones at the soldiers who responded by firing tear gas grenades and a sound bomb through the gates.
There were no reports of any injuries. The clashes come a day after Samih Hassuna and Ibrahim Abbas, the head of Bethlehem’s student union and his predecessor respectively, were arrested by the army in central Bethlehem, according to Palestinian security sources.
The town, which enjoyed a symbolic pullback by Israeli occupation troops during Christmas celebrations earlier this week, was reoccupied by Israeli troops in November.
In another development, a booby-trapped car exploded early yesterday in the heart of west Jerusalem, injuring the would-be bomber.
No one was hurt in the blast except the apparent bomber, a resident of east Jerusalem, whom police arrested. Large numbers of police cordoned off the sector.
