Palestinian President Yasser Arafat on Saturday reiterated the need for sending observers to the Occupied Territories, describing the situation there as “dangerous,” reported the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA.
In an interview with Egypt’s Middle East news agency (MENA), Arafat urged the international community to quickly intervene and save the Palestinians from the Israeli aggression.
Arafat on Thursday wound up a tour that took him to several Arab countries and Italy, where he stressed the need to send observers to the occupied lands to enforce a US-brokered ceasefire and implementation of the recommendations in the Mitchell commission report.
Since the September 2000 eruption of the latest Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation, the media has reported that Palestinians have killed at least 128 Israelis with weapons ranging from stones and knives to machineguns and car bombs. Israeli military sources have reported well over 600 injuries to Israelis of Jewish descent.
In the same time period, according to international media reports, Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers have killed 13 Arab Israelis and at least 538 Palestinians with weapons ranging from machineguns and tanks to US-made Apache helicopter gunships and F-16s.
According to an Amnesty International report issued early this year, nearly 100 of the Palestinians killed were children. In addition, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society has reported over 14,000 Palestinians wounded.
Jewish author Noam Chomsky, who according to a New York Times Book Review article is “arguably the most important intellectual alive,” has been quoted as saying: “State terrorism is an extreme form of terrorism, generally much worse than individual terrorism because it has the resources of a state behind it.” – Albawaba.com
