Abbas Resigns; Israel Bombs Gaza City

A disillusioned Mahmoud Abbas resigned as prime minister Saturday after a four-month power struggle with Yasser Arafat, leaving Israel and the United States without a negotiating partner and prompting calls by some top Israeli officials to expel Arafat.

Just hours later, an Israeli warplane dropped a 550-pound bomb on a Gaza City apartment in a botched attempt to kill several top Hamas leaders, including the Islamic militant group's founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who escaped with a minor injury.
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Israel's Assassination Policy Triggers Latest Suicide Bombings

Palestinian suicide bombings are vicious and grave abuses, clearly war crimes under international law for intentionally killing civilians. They have also been a strategic disaster for Palestinian national aspirations, souring the Israeli public on peace and damaging the Palestinian cause in the court of world opinion.

Nevertheless, it is nearly impossible to avoid concluding that the current Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has either deliberately provoked a number of them or at least undertaken actions that would clearly risk them. Either way, it is complicit in the deaths of scores of Israeli citizens.

For how else can one explain the Israeli decision to assassinate senior military and political leaders from militant Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad during the past three months when it is well documented that such actions frequently result in a suicide bombing, usually within a week?

In four of the past five suicide bombings, the timing of the bombing, the fact that group whose senior militant was assassinated carried out the attack, and the explicit claim of revenge for the assassination in all of these cases leave little room for doubt about cause and effect.
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False frontier

Few countries in the world - so said a television newscaster in a surge of patriotism on Monday - would carry out such an exhaustive and painful investigation against itself as Israel has with the Or Commission. Unintentionally, the newscaster seems to have touched on the deep-seated motives, buried in the collective soul, which help to explain the frenzy of self-flagellation and media-hyped masochistic ecstasy that has swept the country since the publication of the commission's findings this week.
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