Fearing a new round of tit-for-tat fighting, Palestinians braced on Friday for a possible Israeli reprisal for mortar attacks on Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, reported Reuters.
Haaretz reported that Palestinians fired a mortar shell at the Gaza Strip settlement of Gedid on Friday morning. There were no injuries reported.
It said the mortar shell landed in adjacent greenhouses belonging to the settlement. No damage was caused.
An earlier round scored a direct hit on a house in the Gush Katif settlement bloc in southern Gaza on Thursday. In other attacks, a mortar bomb fell in Israel, near the Gaza Strip, and another landed near the Netzarim Jewish settlement.
No-one was hurt in any of the incidents. But Israel has recently responded to such attacks by pounding Palestinian security targets with missiles in a new strategy to quell an almost eight-month-old Palestinian uprising.
Palestinians have reacted to the Israeli attacks with defiance and cries for revenge.
"They think they can bring the Palestinian people to their knees, forgetting that...we will never be humiliated and we will never surrender," Palestinian President Yasser Arafat told reporters in Gaza on Thursday.
Israel, meanwhile, has found itself on the defensive over its 145 Jewish settlements which dot the West Bank and Gaza Strip, lands it captured in the 1967 Middle East war and that Palestinians want for a future state.
ICRC OFFICIAL CONDEMNS SETTLEMENTS
An official with the International Committee of the Red Cross said Jewish settlements on land Israel occupied in the 1967 conflict constituted a war crime under humanitarian law, said the agency.
"The policy of settlement as such in humanitarian law is a war crime," Rene Kosirnik of the International Committee of the Red Cross told a news conference in Jerusalem on Thursday.
Israel accused the ICRC of siding with the Palestinians on settlements, which the two sides agreed in interim peace deals to resolve in peace negotiations for a final treaty.
The settlements, which top the agenda of the Palestinian revolt, have drawn fire from former US senator George Mitchell's international inquiry which recommended last week that Israel freeze all settlement building.
Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo has made a written appeal to the US Congress, a traditional bastion of support for Israel, asking it to back the Mitchell committee's findings.
In fresh violence late on Thursday, Palestinian gunmen opened fire on Israeli tanks and troops on the Gaza-Egypt border following a roadside bomb explosion that witnesses said appeared to have damaged an Israeli tank but caused no casualties.
Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen also exchanged fire in the West Bank in what has become an almost nightly ritual. Two Palestinian security men were wounded in an exchange of fire near the West Bank town of Ramallah, hospital officials said.
The Israeli army said its troops came under Palestinian fire near the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarm, but there were no casualties. An Israeli car was also sprayed with bullets on a West Bank road, but the driver escaped unscathed, it said.
TURKISH PM INVITES SHARON, ARAFAT FOR SECRET TALKS
Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit has revealed that he invited Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to Turkey to hold secret talks, Israel Radio reported Friday, cited by Haaretz on its Internet edition.
Ecevit said that conditions needed for the summit were lacking as Sharon and Arafat did not trust each other.
He added that the violence would not stop as long as Israel demanded an end to violence before reconvening peace negotiations.
Arafat has also denied that Qatar is arranging for talks between him and Sharon in Doha.
ARAB UN REPRESENTATIVES TO DISCUSS SECURITY COUNCIL REFUSAL
Representatives of the Arab World at the United Nations are to meet Friday to discuss a Security Council decision on Thursday to not hold a meeting to discuss Palestinian demands for UN intervention in the ongoing violence, Israel Radio reported.
This is the third attempt on the part of the Palestinians and their supporters to secure international protection of the civilians in the occupied lands.
Marwan Jirani, head of the Palestinian delegation to the UN, accused the United States of exploiting its position as the current head of the Security Council to further its own agenda, said the report.
In informal meetings Thursday, Security Council members decided that, for now, such a meeting would not be held.
Haaretz said that the current president of the Security Council, US Ambassador to the UN James Cunningham, had expressed opposition to holding the meeting.
A senior American source was quoted as saying that "the US is carrying out intensive contacts with all sides involved, therefore we argue that to return the issue at this time to the Security Council will not assist the process." - Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
