Sharon: My government will never evacuate the settlements

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday that a government headed by him would never evacuate settlements, especially not isolated settlements, at least until the next general elections.

The prime minister, banging on the table for emphasis, added that the government would not even discuss evacuating the settlements until the elections, set for October 2003, and possibly even beyond that should he be elected for a second term.
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Until the settlements and occupation go, the Palestinians will resist. The blood will continue to flow with Sharon in power

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Listen to Barghouti

It's a good thing Israel did not kill Marwan Barghouti; but it's a shame that it arrested him. Following dozens of assassinations, the Israel Defense Forces suddenly proved that when it wants to arrest someone instead of assassinating him, it knows how to do it quite well. If Israel had only adopted the same approach with Fatah activist Dr. Thabet Thabet, or the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Ali Mustafa, plus a long list of other targeted Palestinians, the intifada's flames would be a lot lower and a lot of blood would have been spared on both sides.

Regrettably, however, Israel did not take the wiser course of action and allow the Tanzim leader to remain in hiding, the way it has done with some of the other leaders of the Palestinian security services whom, Israel says, have been involved in terror attacks. Arresting Barghouti may have been just, but it is not wise. Now he'll become the Palestinian Nelson Mandela.
(...)

Barghouti may be responsible for ruthless terror attacks, but Israel is likely to long for leaders like him, because his heirs will be much, much worse. Full of vengeance and hate, they will not be partners to a compromise like he would be. "You think tomorrow they'll find someone more moderate than me, someone to make [Chief of Staff Shaul] Mofaz coffee in the morning?" he quipped to me a few months ago when he feared he was on Israel's death list.

Barghouti did not begin by killing. As a politician, who apparently turned into a terrorist, it cannot be said of him that he did not try the path of negotiations. He was a peace activist. Few Palestinians were as active as he in promoting peace. He was deeply involved in contacts with many Israelis - and not only ones from the left - and never hid his admiration for certain elements of Israeli life. "I wake up in the morning and look West, not East," he once told me. In those days, he marched in peace demonstrations, his arms locked with those of Meretz lawmakers Dedi Zucker and Zahava Gal-On.

That image may be surreal now, just like the days when he used to take his children to the Safari animal park in Ramat Gan. He would visit the political parties' central committees and MKs, making friends with some of them on joint delegations overseas, never missing a meeting and believing all the time in the purpose of the dialogue. "When will you finally understand that nothing frightens the Palestinians the way the settlements do?" he asked me on Land Day in 1997, while we drove around burning tires in his little car.
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What Israel Has Done
by Edward Said

Despite Israel's effort to restrict coverage of its destructive invasion of the West Bank's Palestinian towns and refugee camps, information and images have nevertheless seeped through. The Internet has provided hundreds of verbal as well as pictorial eyewitness reports, as have Arab and European TV coverage, most of it unavailable or blocked or spun out of existence from the mainstream US media. That evidence provides stunning proof of what Israel's campaign has actually--has always--been about: the irreversible conquest of Palestinian land and society. The official line (which Washington has basically supported, along with nearly every US media commentator) is that Israel has been defending itself by retaliating against the suicide bombings that have undermined its security and even threatened its existence. That claim has gained the status of an absolute truth, moderated neither by what Israel has done nor by what in fact has been done to it.
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thanks to BookNotes

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Human rights abuses and horror stories

The Israeli reoccupation of Palestinian cities and towns has seen a rise in incidents of alleged human rights abuses in the West Bank.

Most of these relate to the curfews imposed in places such as Nablus and Bethlehem. These incidents, normally unreported in the media, are collated by human rights groups such as B'Tselem, the main Israeli group focusing on the West Bank and Gaza, and by peace activists such as Gush Shalom.

Many of the incidents are in the city of Nablus, which, along with Jenin, has suffered most from the present Israeli offensive:

Qossay Abu 'Aisha, 12, was playing in his yard in the Askar neighbourhood of Nablus on Tuesday. The yard is surrounded by a two-metre high tin fence. Israeli soldiers, part of the force that has reoccupied the city, opened fire, punctured the fence and hit him with two bullets, killing him instantly. Source: B'Tselem
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Gimme Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin

Most of the homes at the edge of the camp are somewhat intact, although doors, windows and walls are badly damaged by tank shells and Apache bullets. Each home that we entered was ransacked. Drawers, desks and closets were emptied. Refrigerators were turned over, light fixtures pulled out of the walls, clothing torn.

I thought of the stories women told me, earlier that morning, about Israeli soldiers entering their homes with large dogs that sniffed at the children as neighbors fled from explosions, snipers, fires and the nightmare chases of bulldozers.

Recovery will take a very long time.
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Hamas threatens deadlier attacks

Hamas has been Israel's deadliest foe, dispatching scores of suicide bombers in 19 months of fighting. But the Islamic group boasts it has escaped Israel's military offensive and now threatens to carry out even deadlier attacks -- with weapons-grade explosives, not fertilizer bombs.

Weapons available to Hamas have increased in quantity and quality recently, with light arms and ammunition smuggled from Egypt through underground tunnels to the Gaza Strip without the knowledge of the Cairo government.

At the same time, the Palestinian security forces have been largely dismantled, with facilities destroyed and personnel in hiding or detained by Israel. And Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is confined by Israeli troops to his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

"We are in a situation in which the capacity of the Palestinian Authority to manage security issues is greatly diminished and in some areas totally destroyed," the U.N. envoy to the Middle East, Terje Roed-Larsen, said Friday.
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