Israeli Armor Enters Center Of Bethlehem
The Washington Post, April 2, 2002

washingtonpost.com

Israeli Armor Enters Center Of Bethlehem

Security Complex Hit as West Bank Offensive Widens

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 2, 2002; Page A01

JERUSALEM, April 2 (Tuesday) – Widening its West Bank offensive, Israel moved tanks into the center of Bethlehem and attacked a nearby refugee camp today after fanning out Monday to the towns of Tulkarm and Qalqilyah and arresting hundreds of Palestinians in Ramallah in house-to-house searches for gunmen and wanted militants.
    Israeli forces also attacked the hilltop headquarters of Palestinian Preventive Security outside Ramallah, firing tank shells and machine guns, Palestinian officials said. They said the Palestinian security chief for the West Bank, Jibril Rajoub, who was not inside the building, had ordered the 400 men inside to resist. Israeli helicopters also fired at the building, the Palestinian officials said, engulfing it in flames and causing many casualties. After daybreak, the flames had ebbed, leaving two of the buildings in the sprawling compound smoldering, blackened wrecks.
    The five-day-old Israeli operation, backed by a call-up of reservists, showed no sign of ending the bloody bombing attacks that have savaged the Jewish state in recent weeks. A suicide bomber blew himself up in his car Monday night in Jerusalem, seriously injuring a policeman, after being stopped at a roadblock along the line separating the eastern sector of the city, inhabited mostly by Palestinians, from the predominantly Jewish western part.
    Monday's incident marked the sixth bombing in Israel within six days. Previous attacks spurred Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday to declare that "the state of Israel is at war . . . against terror" after launching this unprecedented military operation deep into Palestinian-controlled areas. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group that sprang from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, identified the bomber as Rami Muhammed Hussein al-Shouani, 22, from the Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem.
    Witnesses in Bethlehem, cited by the Reuters news agency, said Israeli tanks and armored vehicles pushed into the city center, taking the methodical Israeli sweep to another center of Palestinian resistance. Before the assault, young Palestinians wearing camouflage uniforms and brandishing assault rifles in historic Manger Square said they were prepared to resist the Israeli advance but held out little hope of preventing it. Reports from Palestinians living nearby said Israeli helicopters used rocket fire to open a push on the Deheishe camp.
    Palestinians began killing suspected collaborators ahead of the Israeli advances. In Tulkarm, a West Bank town 40 miles north of Jerusalem, seven suspected collaborators were dragged out of an intelligence service jail and killed by masked gunmen. The bodies of two other suspected collaborators were discovered ahead of the Israeli move into Qalqilyah, south of Tulkarm.
    Another suspected collaborator was executed in public in Bethlehem, about six miles south of Jerusalem. "He was a very faithful informer" for the Israelis, said Mayor Hanna J. Nasser. Asked if the man had received a trial, Nasser replied, "He had a field trial."
    The violence in Israel and the West Bank showed signs of spilling over to the streets of Arab capitals, with angry crowds clashing with police wielding truncheons and firing water cannons in Cairo and Amman, the capital of Jordan. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations also erupted in Beirut; Tripoli, Libya; and Khartoum, Sudan. Israeli security officials said Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas fired a rocket across the border into northern Israel for the first time since Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000.
    Delegates to a meeting of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, passed a resolution accusing Israel of "dragging the region toward an all-out war" and calling for U.N. sanctions. But the conference split over an appeal by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, the conference's host, to have the group declare that Palestinian suicide bombings constitute terrorism.
    President Bush, echoing repeated appeals from his administration, called on Arafat to take steps to halt the suicide bombings against Israelis. "There will never be peace so long as there is terror, and all of us should fight terror," Bush said. "I'd like to see Chairman Arafat denounce the terror."
    Arafat, 72, who heads the Palestinian Authority, remained bottled up in his Ramallah office building, with Israeli troops camping out in the heavily damaged compound.
    Israel has said the current operation, its largest since the invasion of Lebanon 20 years ago, is not aimed at permanently reoccupying West Bank and Gaza Strip territory turned over to Palestinian rule under the 1993 Oslo peace accords. Rather, Israeli officials said, it is designed to "uproot" what Sharon has called the "infrastructure of terrorism" under Arafat.
    Israeli troops in Ramallah rounded up hundreds of Palestinian men, including what a military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Ron Kitrey, called "a relatively large number of wanted people at different levels of importance." Since moving into Ramallah early Friday, he said, Israeli forces have taken 700 Palestinians into custody.
    But Palestinians charged that the campaign is an attempt to reoccupy Palestinian-administered areas and return the political and military landscape to what it was before 1993, when Israeli forces controlled all the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Palestinians had no organized armed forces.
    "They say they are here to collect guns and detain those people who are wanted," Nasser said. "But this military plan now being implemented is an old one and has been delayed several times. . . . Sharon doesn't believe in Oslo; he's against Oslo."
    The U.N. Security Council has demanded that Israel withdraw its forces from Palestinian areas. But Sharon has shown no sign of being deterred by criticism. Israel's military operation has come at the end of one of the most violent months in Israel's history, with about 125 Israelis killed in March and hundreds more injured.
    The violence continued Monday. A 22-year-old Israeli was shot and killed by a sniper in Har Homa, a Jewish housing project in an area occupied in the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed on to Jerusalem. The violence continued for Palestinians, too, as an 11-year-old boy was reported shot and killed by Israeli troops in the southern Gaza Strip.
    Israeli troops were visible Monday night at approaches to Bethlehem, at Rachel's tomb in the north and at the entrance to the Deheishe camp at the southern side of the town. Palestinian gunmen seen at dusk on Manger Square – in front of the Church of the Nativity, which tradition says is the site of Jesus's birth – had black paint smeared on their faces and said they were prepared for what they promised would be violent resistance to the expected Israeli incursion.
    "Me and my buddies are going to fight until we get killed, because we have no other choice," said a 27-year-old gunman, who declined to give his name but who identified himself as a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
    "It's true we don't have sophisticated weapons like the Israelis, but our main weapon is we are defending a just cause," said the gunman, dressed in camouflage fatigues, a black headband and with a grenade strapped to one shoulder.
    He fingered an M-16 automatic rifle equipped with a scope and a Palestinian flag affixed to the butt. The weapon, he said, once belonged to his best friend, a fighter named Mahmoud Awad who was killed in an earlier Israeli thrust into the town.
    "This is his rifle, and I am going to be loyal to it," he said.
    The gunmen lingering on Manger Square, like the Palestinian Authority officials in their offices overlooking it, conceded they had no chance of withstanding the vastly superior force of the Israeli army. "We don't believe we can keep them out," said another al-Aqsa Brigades member, wearing desert camouflage and holding an AK-47 assault rifle. "But we're determined to put up the best fight we can."
    "There is no way anybody can say we can match Israel's military power," said the Bethlehem area governor, Mohammed Madani. "We can't even get close."
    Israeli troops met scattered resistance elsewhere in the West Bank. Gunfights broke out repeatedly in Ramallah. Eight Israeli soldiers were reported injured there, one seriously, and eight others were reported injured in a roadside explosion at Qalqilyah. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed in Ramallah since the campaign began, the army said.
    Palestinian casualties were more difficult to estimate. The Israeli military said a Ramallah hospital had 25 bodies in its morgue since the onset of the Israeli operation. The bodies had not been buried because Palestinians are not permitted on the streets because of a 24-hour curfew.
    A half-dozen foreign peace activists, including two from the United States, were injured as they marched toward the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jala and encountered an Israeli checkpoint. The activists, who were marching under a banner that said "We Want Peace, Not War," said a group of about 100 of them approached the checkpoint to ask permission to continue their march when a soldier opened fire at the ground in front of them from a machine gun mounted atop a tank.
    Peter Qumri, director of the Beit Jala hospital, said he treated six foreigners – two Americans, a Briton, an Australian, a Frenchman and a Japanese woman – all for fragment wounds. A Palestinian cameraman with the group was also seriously wounded.
    The Israeli army said it was investigating the incident.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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