|
Israel/Palestine
In Arafat's bunker, the mood is defiant as Israel unleashes ever deadlier force It was a pledge no sooner made than broken. Less than a day elapsed after Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, declared his arch-enemy Yasser Arafat was free to move again in the occupied territories before Israel's tanks penetrated the Palestinian leader's shattered fiefdom again, with even more armour and deadly force. Israel's tanks rolled deep into the Gaza Strip, killing more than two dozen Palestinians. The toll at the end of a bloody day was six Israelis and two gunmen killed in a Galilee ambush, and an Israeli shot in the West Bank, taking the total to 39 on both sides in 24 hours.
The tanks rumbled through Ramallah by the score, backed by 20,000 Israeli troops, raiding yet another refugee camp and drawing up within a stone's throw of the compound in which Mr Arafat is confined. ---------- Arafat Accuses Israel of Tattooing Numbers on Prisoners' Arms
Sources from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) The Israeli army claims it was just a colored pen but it has disturbed some Jews who remember the Holocaust. It should. The site of 20,000 armed solidiers invading the refugee camps should also bring back visions of the Warsaw Ghetto. --------- It is impossible to ignore the nature of the operation, which was a significant departure from the declared policy until now, in which a distinction was made between those who deal in terror, who must be vanquished, and the wider population, whom Israel did not want to engage in conflict. This time, the IDF caused deliberate suffering and humiliation to the broader Palestinian population. This cannot be interpreted any other way: The government of Israel, through the IDF, sought to use humiliation as a means of pressure or punishment. There is no other way to understand those photographed scenes of hundreds of people, bound and blindfolded, on their way to interrogations.
Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz was very tardy with his reservations about marking the prisoners with writing on their arms. Brig. Gen. Gershon Yitzhak, commander of IDF forces in the West Bank, said yesterday that the blindfolds and cuffing of the prisoners, was insensitive. The belated reservations from the high command about the operation raise questions. Didn't the commanders instruct the soldiers in advance how to deal with the civilians? It is worrisome to discover that the chief of staff and the commander of the forces were unaware from the start of the profound significance of wide-scale friction with the population. ---------- More Israeli Jews favor transfer of Palestinians, Israeli Arabs - poll finds
Some 46 percent of Israel's Jewish citizens favor transferring Palestinians out of the territories, while 31 percent favor transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country, according to the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies' annual national security public opinion poll. Transfer is a polite word for ethnic cleansing. Others call it genocide. Transfer has been on the Israeli Right's agenda all along. Now it is sliding into the mainstream. |