Israel was bracing Wednesday for retaliation from angry Palestinians after it launched its deadliest strike in the 10-month uprising, killing five Hamas leaders, a journalist and two children.
Israel upped the stakes in the Middle East conflict on Tuesday with the attack which brought thousands of protesting Palestinians out on to the street and sparked vows of revenge from Palestinian leaders and condemnation from Arab and foreign countries.
The Hamas leaders were identified as Jamal Mansour, 41, and 42-year-old Jamal Salim.
The attack, which the Israeli government said was a "preventative" strike to stop the men preparing bomb attacks on Israeli targets, also killed two young brothers, aged six and nine, and seriously injured their mother as they were passing the downtown apartment building where the Hamas office was located.
The United States, Britain and France, as well as Arab leaders, condemned the attack which Washington described as "provocative" and "excessive," said AFP.
Two other Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, one an Islamic Jihad militant shot dead in a firefight and the other a policeman gunned down near a flashpoint Jewish settlement.
Thousands of angry Palestinians staged protests across the Palestinian territories after the West Bank attack. Some rallies turned violent, with four people hit by Israeli rubber-coated steel bullets in the West Bank town of Ramallah, according to the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA.
A 15-month-old baby girl near Nablus and an old man near Bethlehem were also wounded by Israeli gunfire.
The Palestinian authorities declared two days of official mourning following the Nablus killings.
Elsewhere, Israeli tanks made a 200 meter incursion into Palestinian territory near the settlement of Netzarim in the central Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources told WAFA, after the army reported more than a dozen mortar attacks on settlements Tuesday evening.
In a related development, five Jewish settlers, among them three members of a family from the West Bank settlement of Dolev, were wounded Tuesday night in a shooting attack on two vehicles near the West Bank settlement of Telmon, west of Ramallah, said Haaretz.
The mother of the family suffered serious wounds to her legs and stomach, the father was moderately wounded and their son was lightly injured, it said.
The two other settlers, who were in another vehicle, were lightly wounded by shrapnel.
Also, an Israeli border policeman was lightly wounded by gunfire in the West Bank town of Hebron on Wednesday morning, said Haaretz.
Tuesday evening, Palestinian gunmen in the town of Beit Jala exchanged heavy gunfire with Israeli troops stationed in Jewish settlement of Gilo near Bethlehem.
There were no injuries in the gunbattle that raged for nearly an hour, but two houses in Gilo suffered slight damage, according to the paper.
There was a break in the gunfire of about two hours before Palestinian gunmen again opened fire on the settlement, claimed the paper.
Several hundred Israeli police and soldiers have been stationed at key points around Jerusalem, and Israeli border police patrols along the Green Line have been stepped up in an effort to block efforts to penetrate Israel, the paper added.
In the wake of Monday's unrest, the paper said that the Israeli army also tightened its seige of West Bank cities, especially Ramallah, Bethlehem and Tulkarem.
Washington denounced this "new and dangerous escalation of violence."
"This attack... is highly provocative, and makes efforts to restore calm much more difficult," a State Department spokesman said in a condemnation echoed by Paris and London.
For his part, US President George W. Bush urged both sides to "break the cycle of violence" which has killed 54 Palestinians and 17 Israelis since a US-sponsored ceasefire was declared on June 13 to try to end the fighting.
An editorial in the Egyptian government newspaper, Al Gomhuriya, to be published Wednesday, called on Arabs and Muslims to demand "an eye for an eye" for the Israeli attack.
The United Nations office for the Middle East peace process ripped apart the Israeli offensive, describing it as "particularly regrettable" and cautioning that "such actions are almost guaranteed to lead to a further escalation of tension," AFP said.
Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said Israel would pay the price for the attack, warning "our blood is not cheap."
The rage spread as far as Jordan, where police blocked several hundred protestors from marching on the cabinet building to demand the cancellation of Jordan's 1994 peace treaty with Israel, said reports.
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, in Cairo, said the attack on the Hamas office was a "very dangerous escalation which proves Israel has started to carry out its plan against the Palestinian people," WAFA quoted him as saying.
Arafat, who is trying to garner support for an emergency Arab summit to tackle the problems in the strife-torn region, continued a regional tour.
Israel insisted, however, that the Hamas activists were responsible for previous attacks on the Jewish state and were plotting fresh violence.
"The army acted in order to prevent acts of murder and sabotage against Israelis," the government said, adding that any civilian deaths were "regrettable," according to Israeli reports.
Meanwhile, a man suspected of collaborating with Israel was gunned down by masked men near the West Bank town of Bethlehem, said AFP.
Within the same context, a Palestinian security court sentenced three men to death for collaborating with Israel, while a fourth was sentenced to 15 years in prison, said reports.
Since the September 2000 eruption of the latest Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation, the media has reported that Palestinians have killed at least 130 Israelis with weapons ranging from stones and knives to machineguns and car bombs. Israeli military sources have reported well over 600 injuries to Israelis of Jewish descent.
In the same time period, according to the international media, Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers have killed 13 Arab Israelis and over 525 Palestinians with weapons ranging from machineguns and tanks to US-made Apache helicopter gunships and F-16s.
According to an Amnesty International report issued early this year, nearly 100 of the Palestinians killed were children. In addition, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society has reported well over 14,000 Palestinians wounded.
Jewish author Noam Chomsky, who according to a New York Times Book Review article is “arguably the most important intellectual alive,” has been quoted as saying: “State terrorism is an extreme form of terrorism, generally much worse than individual terrorism because it has the resources of a state behind it.” – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
