JENIN, West Bank, 12 March 2004 — Tens of thousands of furious Palestinians vowed yesterday to exact revenge on Israel as the West Bank town of Jenin ground to a halt for the funerals of five Palestinians shot dead by Israeli troops.
Mourners chanted “Israel will pay the price” and “our revenge will be in Tel Aviv and Haifa” as the bodies of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades fighters were carried through the streets.
And the local leader of the group warned that hundreds of fellow Palestinians had offered to take part in suicide attacks and would not be thwarted by Israel’s West Bank separation barrier.
As he watched his 24-year-old son Ayman’s body being buried in Jenin’s main graveyard, Muhammad Sabahna spoke of his pride that his son had died “in the fight for Palestine” but also of his hope that the cycle of killing would come to an end.
“I feel deep sadness but also pride that my son has died as a martyr. It is the highest honor,” he said. But he said that he had no desire to see any other of his three surviving offspring meet the same fate. “I hope that my son is the last Palestinian to have to die.”
However, the powerful local Brigades commander, Zakaria Zubeidi said hundreds of Palestinians have told him they were ready to take part in suicide attacks. “Hundreds have come to see me (to offer to take part in suicide attacks) and there are many more in the West Bank,” Zubeidi told AFP, guarded by some half a dozen gunmen. “We have plans throughout the West Bank to increase our attacks,” he added.
Zubeidi said his movement would carry out swift revenge attacks after the killing of the five in eastern Jenin by an Israeli undercover unit on Wednesday.
Israeli sources said the five were shot as they were planning an attack on the nearby settlement of Qadim. “Of course our reaction will not be in the form of a statement to the media. It will be carried out on the ground and will be very swift,” Zubeidi said. “The wall will not stop us.”
The Al-Aqsa Brigades is a radical and largely autonomous offshoot of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, whose birthplace and stronghold is in Jenin. It claimed responsibility for the most recent suicide attack in Israel on Feb. 22 when eight bus passengers were killed in the German Colony area of Jerusalem. In a show of solidarity with the overwhelmingly Muslim city, bells were rung out from the local Catholic church during the procession.
The governor of Jenin, Ramadan Al-Batta, said any reprisal “will be the responsibility of the Israeli Army and government. “This is the biggest funeral I have ever seen. The whole city feels sorrow, pain and much anger,” he added.
Meanwhile, local authorities in the West Bank town of Nablus said the Israeli Army has seized 300 hectares (740 acres) of Palestinian land in four villages to build its controversial West Bank separation barrier.
Confiscation orders were sent to the municipal councils of Masha, Al-Zawiya, Rafat and Deir Ballut, southeast of the town of Qalqilya. The documents, copies of which were obtained by Agence France Presse yesterday, were signed by Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, who heads Israel’s central command in charge of the occupied West Bank. There, the barrier veers several kilometers off the course of the “green line” separating Israel from the West Bank in order to include Jewish settlements. A section which has been completed already through the western sector of the village of Masha, loops around before slicing through Masha’s eastern sector.
