The military wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has claimed responsibility for a series of bomb blasts in occupied Jerusalem early Monday, slightly wounding at least five people.
The group, named after PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustapha, who was assassinated by Israel last week, said the attacks came in retaliation of the assassination and Israeli aggressions against the Palestinian people.
Israeli sources had said that three of the bombs went off in the Jewish settlement of French Hill, or the Giva Hatzarfatit, in northern Jerusalem, the latest a car bomb that injured one person, AFP and Haaretz newspaper reported.
Earlier on Monday a bomb went off near an apartment building in the same settlement and a second exploded under a truck.
At the same time, police reported a bomb went off in a Jerusalem municipality truck parked in the Gilo Jewish settlement, wounding two people.
Gilo, considered by Israel to be a neighborhood of Jerusalem, has witnessed fierce gun battles between Palestinian fighters and Israeli soldiers since the start of a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
Witnesses told Haaretz that the bomb was hidden in a car belonging to the Jerusalem municipality.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian news agency, WAFA, reported that a Palestinian man died Monday of wounds he sustained last week in Rafah in the Gaza Strip.
It said that Khaled Awajah was seriously injured last week when the occupation troops made an incursion into the city, followed by clashes with Palestinian resistance fighters.
Awajah’s death and the bombings came amid a spate of overnight violence.
Farid Aziza, a Christian Palestinian businessman from the Palestinian town of Beit Jala in the West Bank, was wounded Sunday by Palestinian gunmen in the Bethlehem area, a hospital source told the paper.
According to Beit Jala residents, Palestinian opposition groups suspected that Aziza had contacts with Israel. He suffered several gunshot wounds, and was brought to a Jerusalem hospital for treatment, said the paper.
Meanwhile, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana was to meet Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Monday at the start of a Middle East tour aimed at consolidating a ceasefire and reviving a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians, said AFP.
Solana, who arrived Sunday in Tel Aviv, will try to facilitate a proposed meeting between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to bring about a step-by-step ceasefire in the 11-month-old conflict, diplomatic sources said.
Solana was scheduled to meet with Sharon on Monday afternoon before the Israeli leader departed for Moscow, and then hold discussions in Jerusalem with Peres, an EU official said.
The same day he was also scheduled to meet with top Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erakat in Jericho, in the West Bank.
On Tuesday, he will meet with Arafat in Ramallah, also in the West Bank.
On Friday, Solana said the internationally approved Mitchell plan remained "the best way forward to break the current deadlock, stop the escalation and resume a political dialogue" to end the Middle East bloodshed which has left more than 760 dead since last September, the overwhelming majority of them Palestinian civilians, according to AFP estimates.
The Mitchell plan, drafted by a commission led by the former US senator, recommends a six-week cooling-off period, followed by confidence-building measures, a freeze on developing Jewish settlements and, ultimately, a return to political negotiations.
Solana is later expected to travel on to Amman for meetings with Jordan's King Abdullah and Foreign Minister Abdel Al Khatib, and to Cairo for talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The visit is seen as part of a move by the European Union to raise its profile in the Middle East peace process as the administration of US President George W. Bush scales back US involvement in the region.
Israel, meanwhile, lashed out at the "anti-Semitic" declarations made at the UN conference on racism.
Although UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said the equation of Zionism with racism that Arab countries have pushed for was "dead," nerves remained frayed over the Middle East at the UN-sponsored conference in Durban, South Africa.
"Some of the declarations and resolutions adopted in Durban are clearly racist and anti-Semitic," Israeli President Moshe Katsav said during a visit to southern Israel.
For his part, Peres said Israel was "seriously considering" recalling its delegation from Durban, and boycotting the rest of the meetings if "excessively extremist resolutions" were adopted.
On the ground, two Palestinian activists were killed Sunday in clashes with Israeli troops in the West Bank town of Hebron as Israel deployed heavy security for the start of the new school year, fearing Palestinian attacks.
AFP's latest death tally for the Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation comes out to 13 Arab Israelis, over 578 Palestinians, and around 155 Israelis, putting the ratio of casualties at around four Palestinians killed for every Israeli loss. Other sources count over 600 Palestinians killed.
Israel’s wounded number in the high hundreds, according to army sources, while the Palestine Red Crescent Society puts the number of Palestinians injured at over 15,000.
Amnesty International reported early this year that almost 100 Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli soldiers, nearly all in situations where the occupation troops were under no immediate threat.
The latest Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation began last September – Albawaba.com
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