GAZA CITY, 19 August 2004 — An Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza City early yesterday killed five activists of the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement and wounded eight people, three of them seriously, hospital officials reported.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians demonstrated throughout the West Bank and Gaza later yesterday to express solidarity for more than 2,000 Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli jails.
President Yasser Arafat, in an address to the Palestinian Parliament, called on people to join him in a day of fasting to identify with the prisoners.
Hundreds of Hamas supporters and militants, meanwhile, marched in the Gaza City funeral procession of the five Hamas activists killed earlier in the day, carrying Palestinian and green Hamas flags, firing in the air and chanting calls for revenge.
Witnesses said a loud explosion occurred as a group of Hamas members was gathering in the yard of a two-storey house shortly after midnight, shaking the entire Sheja’eya neighborhood. They believed the explosion was caused by missiles fired by a drone, as they heard no helicopters or F-16 fighter jets.
The Israeli Army issued a statement saying only that the air force targeted a senior member of the militant Hamas organization. Palestinians said the target was Ahmed Al-Jabari, the local commander of Hamas’ armed wing Ezzadin El-Qassam. Jabari himself escaped uninjured, but two of his sons were among the dead.
On a “day of rage” declared by the Palestinian Prisoners Club, at least 4,000 people marched in downtown Ramallah to express support for the Palestinian hunger strikers, carrying pictures of jailed relatives and calling for their release.
Thousands also took to the streets of Gaza City, while hundreds held similar demonstrations in Qalqilya, Tulkarm and Jenin. Inmates of two Israeli jails joined day four of the mass hunger strike yesterday, bringing the total number of strikers to 2,264.
The prisoners joining the strike were inmates of the Shikma jail in the south and the Shata prison in the north of the country, prisons spokesman Ian Domnitz said.
He added, however, that some prisoners who had been fasting had begun eating, including Intifada (uprising) leader Marwan Barghouti, the former West Bank head of Arafat’s ruling Fatah movement, who he said was photographed eating in his cell.
The latest airstrike in a surge of violence triggered by Israel’s plan to withdraw from Gaza came as Israeli leader Ariel Sharon battled to avoid embarrassment in a party vote at the hands of Likud rebels opposed to ceding the occupied territory.
Sharon plans to pull Jewish settlers and soldiers out of the Gaza Strip by the end of next year and Israeli forces and Palestinian militants are bent on winning “victory” in the run-up to the withdrawal.
On the Israeli political front, Sharon tried to avoid defeat at the hands of party nationalists who oppose ceding Gaza and say it would “reward Palestinian terror”.
At a snap Likud convention, the rebels plan to vote against Sharon’s proposed alliance with the dovish Labour Party in a coalition to push through the withdrawal plan.
Sharon’s aides said he was trying to reach a compromise to avoid defeat in the nonbinding vote, which would be more an embarrassment than politically damaging, but that he planned to pursue coalition talks whatever the result.
Meanwhile, Israeli military police have investigated more than 600 cases of alleged abuse by soldiers against Palestinians during the intifada, the chief military prosecutor told MPs yesterday.
Gen. Menachem Finkelstein told the Israeli Parliament’s constitution, justice and law committee that the case files include 217 violent incidents, 181 cases where Palestinian property was damaged or stolen, and 88 instances involving shooting, a committee spokeswoman told AFP.
Another 114 cases involved various other charges, from the use of Palestinians as human shields to delays caused by the soldiers at checkpoints, according to a document from the committee received by AFP.
A total of 90 indictments have been handed down to soldiers — 34 for property damage and theft, 23 for violence and 22 involving shooting incidents. Another 11 incidents related to various other complaints.
