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