JENIN/GAZA CITY, 8 November 2003 — Five Palestinian activists and a child were killed in the occupied territories yesterday by the Israeli Army, which also captured the militant leader suspected of masterminding last month’s suicide attack in Haifa. Israeli troops shot dead two militants from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades during clashes in the northern West Bank cities of Nablus and Jenin late Friday, Palestinian medical sources said.
Earlier, four Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip. Mahmud Al-Qayed, 11, was killed by shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell as he played with friends in a rural area near the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, Palestinian medics said.
Nimr As-Ous, 22, was picking olives in a nearby grove when he said Israeli troops opened fire. “I started to run when I heard the firing. Mahmud and his friends were trying to catch birds with a net when they were hit by shrapnel,” he told AFP at a hospital in Gaza City. The witnesses said no militants could be seen in the area, but a military source said fire was opened after “three unidentified figures were spotted in an area near the Nahal Oz crossing point, which is banned to Palestinians”.
The boy’s death capped a night of violence that also left three Palestinian gunmen dead elsewhere in the Gaza Strip. Two relatives belonging to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were killed in a clash between militants from their Fatah offshoot and Israeli troops near the fence between the southeastern Gaza Strip and Israel, Palestinian medical sources said.
Four other members of the same family were also wounded in the incident, two of them seriously, the sources said. A firefight also broke out between gunmen in the central Gaza refugee camp of Maghazi and troops posted around the nearby Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom. According to Palestinian sources, one member of the armed wing of the hard-line Islamic movement Hamas was killed.
Meanwhile, President George Bush’s calls for democracy rang hollow in the Middle East, where many said yesterday they were appalled Washington was preaching liberty for Arabs while occupying Iraq. The war on Iraq and Washington’s support for Israel in its bloody conflict with the Palestinians have antagonized many Arabs and Muslims who were already seething at the United States’ war on terror, seen by many as a battle against Islam.
And Bush’s sweeping foreign policy speech on Thursday, in which he challenged ally Egypt and foes Iran and Syria to adopt democracy, fuelled Arab indignation. “Bush’s speech is like a boring, broken record that nobody believes,” said Gulf-based political analyst Moghazy Al-Badrawy.
“He wants democracy and the US is occupying Iraq and its ally Israel is killing Palestinians? Arabs just don’t buy it.”
Abdel-Monem Said, director of Egypt’s Al-Ahram Center for Political Strategic Studies, said the perceived US dishonesty in justifying the Iraq war had also tarnished its credibility. “Democracy is all about legalities, rule of law and legitimacy,” he said. “There is an issue of double standards.”
Mohammad Al-Bsairi, a Kuwaiti member of Parliament and spokesman for the Gulf state’s Muslim Brotherhood, told Reuters Washington’s blind bias for Israel — battling a Palestinian independence uprising — also flew in the face of democracy.
Lebanon’s top Shiite, Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, scornfully described Bush’s call as an attempt to ensure compliancy in the region, rather than better lives. “It’s the democracy of the American administration to preserve its strategic interests in the Middle East and not to preserve the interests of the people,” he said at a sermon.
Meanwhile, an informal Mideast peace plan drafted by prominent Israelis and Palestinians got a significant boost yesterday, with a letter of support from US Secretary of State Colin Powell, organizers said. Powell’s praise for the “Geneva Accord” could be seen as a veiled rebuke to the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon who has attacked the plan as subversive.
Powell’s letter was addressed to the leaders of the initiative, former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, the two told a news conference. “Dear Yossi and Yasser,” the letter read, according to a Beilin aide. “The president remains committed a two state solution ... but we also believe that projects such as yours are important for sustaining hope and understanding.”
In another development, an Egyptian-sponsored resolution demanding that Israel protect Palestinian children was adopted by a UN General Assembly panel on Thursday, while a corresponding measure on Israeli children was postponed until next week. Israel, the target of hundreds of critical UN resolutions, on Tuesday introduced its first assembly draft in more than a quarter century, mirroring the Egyptian measure.
The Egyptian draft resolution was passed by a vote of 88 to 4 but with 58 abstentions. The United States, Israel, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands voted against it, while the 15 European Union nations and Canada were among the abstentions.
Israel’s deputy UN Ambassador, Arye Mekel, told the committee the resolution was one-sided because “we believe that all the world’s children are deserving of equal protection, including Israeli and Palestinian children.” But a Palestinian representative said children in the West Bank and Gaza fell into a special category as they had lived under occupation for the last 40 years. The vote was tantamount to adoption in the full 191-nation General Assembly as every UN member has a seat on the panel.
