TULKARM, West Bank, 23 October 2005 — Israeli soldiers shot and killed two Palestinian youths in the northern West Bank on Friday, Palestinian security officials said. The shootings were the latest of a series of fatal incidents in the past week threatening to unravel an eight-month cease-fire and dash hopes that Israel’s pullout from Gaza last month could lead to a resumption of peace talks.
Palestinian witnesses said troops opened fire on unarmed protesters who threw stones at an army jeep, east of Tulkarm, a town in the northern West Bank, killing an 18-year-old youth. Medics said the youth died immediately of his wounds.
But an Israeli military spokesman said soldiers had shot at gunmen who fired first at the troops and damaged a military vehicle. Soldiers later found one body near the scene, but believed they had shot two armed men, the spokesman said.
Palestinian officials said Israel had informed them of the second fatality but that they had not yet identified the body. A spokesman for the Yasser Arafat Brigades, an offshoot of the militant wing of the mainstream Fatah movement, told Reuters Israel had killed one of its members in Tulkarm.
The same group had claimed responsibility for gunning down three Jewish settlers on a road near the West Bank city of Bethlehem last week. “As a first response” to the latest shooting, the militants said they attacked Israeli forces elsewhere in the northern West Bank with gunfire.
The latest deaths mean three Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops since Thursday when soldiers shot dead a Palestinian youth in Bethlehem. In a separate incident on Friday, a Palestinian policeman was critically wounded in Tulkarm as officers tried to break up a brawl between two Palestinian men on a city street outside a cafe.
Neither Palestinian involved in the brawl was believed to belong to militant groups fighting Israel.
Meanwhile, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met yesterday in Algeria with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on his way back home after a tour that included stops in Europe and the United States. Abbas told reporters that his talks with top officials in the Muslim North African country would “inform our Algerian brothers of the evolution of the situation of the Palestinian cause.”
He met with Bouteflika after being received at the airport in the morning by Algerian Foreign Minister Mohamed Bedjaoui, a government official said.
Details of the meeting were not immediately made public. The visit to Algeria comes after a tour that took Abbas to Jordan, Egypt, France, Spain and Washington. In Washington, Abbas said Friday that an independent Palestinian state can be ready by the end of President George W. Bush’s term in January, 2009 — although Bush now refuses to set a deadline.
Abbas also said in an interview with AFP that he had convinced Bush not to oppose the participation of the radical group Hamas in the Palestinian legislative election to be held in January.
Bush has pulled back from an aim he set a year ago to establish a Palestinian state by the end of his second term, but Abbas said an independent state was “realistic, if we work on it from now.” Abbas said he did not believe Bush had intended to make his comments after their talks at the White House on Thursday.
