TULKARM, West Bank, 14 July 2005 — Israel yesterday sealed off the Palestinian territories and reoccupied the West Bank town of Tulkarm in swift response to a suicide bombing at a shopping mall that killed four women.
The authorities simultaneously closed entrances to all 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip to non-residents with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon determined extremists will not flood the territory ahead of August’s historic pullout.
The military shut down the territories and swept into Tulkarm to hunt down the perpetrators after what was the first suicide attack in Israel in four and a half months, claimed by radical Palestinian faction Islamic Jihad. Troops arrested five members of the movement around Tulkarm, which Israel had returned to Palestinian control last March as a confidence-building gesture.
Sharon said that there would be no hiding place for Jihad as long as their members continued their acts of violence. “I ordered the defense establishment to increase our activity and to do as much harm as possible to the leadership of the Islamic Jihad terror organization,” he said in a speech near Tel Aviv. “We will not leave them alone until they stop these murderous acts.”
Israel has sharply rebuked Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas for doing nothing to dismantle armed groups, even through the Palestinian leader denounced the suicide bombing as “a terrorist attack” and vowed to punish the perpetrators.
The territories would remain closed “until fresh orders are received,” an army spokesman said, as a planned Israeli-Palestinian security meeting to coordinate the Gaza pullout was canceled amid the climate of distrust. Palestinian sources said a police officer was killed and another wounded when the Israeli invasion was met with exchanges of fire. Military sources said the army was occupying Tulkarm.
An Israeli official said plans to transfer control to the Palestinians in the West Bank towns of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Qalqiliya, had now been frozen. Four women, including two aged 16, were killed and dozens wounded when the Islamic Jihad suicide bomber blew himself up on a zebra crossing outside a shopping center Tuesday evening in the coastal town of Netanya.
Visiting EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana demanded action not words from the Palestinian Authority in bringing the perpetrators to justice. “I think after the condemnation there has to be action. I think somebody has to be arrested,” he said after talks with Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei. Sharon ordered a closure on all Israeli settlements in Gaza, determined to prevent ultranationalists who are opposed to the pullout of all soldiers and settlers from Gaza from setting up strongholds in the territory. The move comes ahead of a July 18 mass protest rally organized by opponents of Sharon’s disengagement plan who are planning to march on Gaza.
