Under the rubble
Israeli troops continue to kill Palestinians and demolish homes as Sharon continues his hunt for Palestinian activists. Khaled Amayreh reports from Ramallah
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Israeli soldiers search for the body of a Palestinian activist in the debris of a Palestinian home that they had just demolished on Tuesday; Israeli peace activists hold signs demanding an end to the occupation during a Peace Now demonstration in Tel Aviv on Saturday. Peace activists routinely demonstrate in the West Bank with Palestinian and international peace activists to protest the apartheid wall and house demolitions
A Palestinian labourer is blindfolded and handcuffed after being arrested at the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus on Monday
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Israeli occupation troops stepped up their military activities in the occupied Palestinian territories, as attention continued to focus on the new government being formed by Prime Minister Ahmed Qurieh, as well as Israel's threats to "remove" Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. This week witnessed the killing of at least six Palestinians, some of them crushed to death beneath the rubble of homes dynamited and then levelled to the ground by Israeli bulldozers.
On 18 September, an Israeli tank fired a shell at Brazil refugee camp in Rafah, at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, injuring seven civilians. Meanwhile on Monday, Israeli army tanks pounded the home of a Palestinian family in Hebron with short-range rockets after an exchange of gunfire with at least one Palestinian activist who supposedly took refuge inside. Israeli bulldozers then proceeded to level the house to the ground before it was certain whether or not anyone was inside. The badly mutilated body of a local resistance activist was found in the rubble. Neighbours said occupation soldiers didn't allow the family to remove belongings from their house, even after it was clear that the resistance fighter had been killed. "They herded all family members out at gunpoint, then they started bombarding the home. They wouldn't allow them to remove anything from inside," said one neighbour.
Also on Monday, two Palestinian teenagers were wounded in separate incidents during clashes with Israeli troops in two refugee camps near Nablus. Meanwhile, the occupation army continued to rampage in the northern West Bank town of Jenin for the second consecutive week, terrorising civilians, ravaging infrastructure and demolishing homes.
On the same day, Israeli helicopter gunships fired air-to- ground missiles at the family home of a Fatah activist in the town's eastern outskirts, destroying the structure and injuring several people. The attack was carried out despite the fact that Jenin is under complete Israeli military control, which should have allowed Israel to simply arrest their target.
On Tuesday, Israeli troops killed an Islamic Jihad activist, alleging that he tried to infiltrate an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip.
This week, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dispatched two of his aides to Washington for talks with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the American funding of the apartheid wall.
According to Israeli sources, Sharon's top aide Dov Weisglass and Defence Ministry Director General Amos Yaron succeeded in softening up American "misgivings" about the wall which has ghettoised and isolated many Palestinian population centres, including the town of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank. Qalqilya has already been encircled nearly completely by the concrete wall, leaving only a small 10 metre- wide exit as the only conduit to the outside world. The wall is also slated to decimate nearly half of the Al-Quds University campus in East Jerusalem.
Both the United States and European Union have been making half-hearted objections to the construction of the wall, but the Sharon government seems determined to unilaterally ghettoise Palestinian population centres, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.
