Israel sent extra tanks and troops into the West Bank on Wednesday in what it called a "warning" to Palestinians to stop almost 10 months of rebellion against decades of military occupation, but insisted it had no plans to invade, said reports.
Despite Foreign Minister Shimon Peres saying Israel had no plan to attack the Palestinians, the Israeli army further bolstered its forces around Bethlehem and Beit Jala to protect the nearby Jewish settlement of Gilo in Jerusalem, which came under fire again Wednesday night, said Haaretz newspaper.
"We don't have any intention to attack the Palestinians or occupy their land," Peres told the Qatari satellite TV network Al Jazeera, in reference to the reinforcements deployed by the Israeli army in the West Bank since Tuesday night.
"We're out. We're out forever. We want to live with them in peace, as friends, or even as brothers", said Peres, the leading dove in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's predominantly right-wing government.
Peres made no reference to the rest of the Palestinian land occupied by Israeli troops for 34 years, since it was conquered and settled after the 1967 Mideast war.
Earlier, Peres told the BBC in London that any talk of a new military offensive against the Palestinians was "all imagination" and insisted Palestinian President Yasser Arafat "like us, does not have a choice but to return to peace and reason."
For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was quoted as saying by Haaretz that Israel was not planning any wide-scale military operations against Bethlehem or Jenin, despite beefing up its military presence outside the towns.
He told a cabinet meeting “there is no change in Israel's retaliation policy in the territories.”
But defense establishment sources told the paper that the deployment “aims to up international pressure on the Palestinian Authority to clamp down on violence.”
The sources said the move had succeeded and the said Palestinian Authority officials were "in a panic."
The Palestinians, meanwhile, said the army reinforcements were a "dangerous escalation" of the tension between the two sides, running at fever pitch since Israel killed four Palestinians on Tuesday in a helicopter missile strike targeting Hamas militants.
Sharon's spokesman Raanan Gissin had earlier described the deployment as nothing more than a "warning."
"The presence of the tanks is not to invade areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority but to stabilize the situation, to send a very strong warning message that we will not tolerate these attacks, these shootings and mortar fire," Gissin told AFP.
Asked if the latest violence meant an end to a five-week old US-brokered truce that has failed to take root on the ground, Gissin said: "No. We are still committed to it."
But President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the first Arab state to make peace with Israel, said he did not see any hope for a peace settlement under Sharon, the hawkish former general who took power in March.
"With Sharon there is no solution. He is a man who knows only murder, strikes and war," he said in an interview published by Egypt's state-run news agency MENA.
A Palestinian mother and her two children were injured in the village of Abu Nujeim when a personnel carrier crashed into their house, said AFP.
Palestinians were blocked from going in or out of Bethlehem, where thousands of angry mourners laid to rest the four men killed in Tuesday's helicopter attack, which the Palestinian Authority called an act of war.
The Israeli security cabinet gave its full backing Wednesday to the policy of "intercepting" terrorists and announced a plan aimed at boosting security on the border between the West Bank and Israel.
A coalition of Palestinian groups said after Tuesday's strike that all Israeli settlers and soldiers would be considered potential targets.
Arafat, returning to Gaza from talks in Cairo with Arab ministers, appealed for an extraordinary Arab summit to confront the "Israeli military escalation" and reiterated his call for international observers to be sent to monitor the situation in the Occupied Territories, the agency added.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the European Union plan to send observers, which is vigorously opposed by Israel, was "premature."
However, Arafat's call was echoed in Rome, where impatient G8 foreign ministers promised a stance on the Mideast situation, after the recent violence left the US-brokered June 13 ceasefire in tatters.
They said the weekend's G8 summit in Genoa would send a "strong signal" to the warring parties.
French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said the concept of international observers in the occupied Palestinian territories was "gaining ground."
Italian Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero said for his part that he was "very worried by the situation, and time is limited" to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian violence.
In another development, Israel Radio reported that another Israeli-Palestinian security meeting was held overnight in Tel Aviv.
The radio, cited by Haaretz, said that the meeting ended inconclusively.
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 125 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 UK newspaper The Guardian, Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers have killed 13 Arab Israelis and 510 Palestinians with weapons ranging from machineguns and tanks to US-made Apache helicopter gunships and F-16s.
According to an Amnesty International report, nearly 100 of the Palestinians killed were children. In addition, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society has reported 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)
