The violence continues to escalate.

Powell says Sharon must take 'hard look' at policies

Prime Minister Sharon has to take a hard look at his policies to see whether they will work," U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told a congressional hearing.

"If you declare war on the Palestinians and think you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed -- I don't know that leads us anywhere," he said.
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More force brings more resistance

Meanwhile, nobody is even considering this possibility. Everyone is watching what appears to be the growing entanglement of Sharon's policies. "Balata and Jenin were the beginning of the end to the Israeli occupation," blared a headline in a prominently-positioned article in Al Iyam, while other Palestinian publications printed a list of the largest refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, with their hundreds of thousands of residents. The message was: If Sharon continues with his "war in the camps," which he began at Sabra and Chatila, he has no chance of wiping them all out.

What Israel calls "the target bank," from which the IDF selects objectives at which to strike, is presented by the Palestinian spokespersons as the entire Palestinian nation. The cartoonist at Al Quds drew a picture of the masses filling the streets and houses in a Palestinian city and wrote a caption that read: "The list of wanted men."

It is against this backdrop that the Palestinian public is amazed by the voices in Israel demanding that the IDF be sent out to win a decisive victory. Military victories are only possible in wars between armies, not in the kind of campaign underway in the West Bank and Gaza, they say.
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At least the peace movement seems to be gaining.

After Four Mothers, the Seventh Day arrives

On March 4, 1997, a name was coined for a protest group whose activities contributed to the historic decision to pull out of Lebanon - the Four Mothers Movement. Zohara Antebi, one of the four, sees symbolic significance in the fact that five years to the day, another new movement that also calls for withdrawal - this time from the territories - has been established.

It is called The Seventh Day - the day that will follow and complete the Six Day War, 35 years after it began.
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