Israel killed at least four Palestinians in an air raid on Bethlehem on Tuesday, destroying a house packed with women and children, while Israeli Prime Minister said his army was no longer "in a situation of restraint."
Reports said that the Israeli army had deployed reinforcements along the edges of the occupied Palestinian territories, fearing that resistance fighters would retaliate for the latest Israeli attack.
The Islamist movement, Hamas, which lost two members in the Israeli raid, vowed revenge and said in a statement that every Israeli soldier and settler was a target.
The mid-afternoon helicopter assault killed at least two militants from the radical Hamas movement and wounded 14 people, including a young girl who lost her arm, hospital sources said.
"The Palestinian National Authority strongly condemns this gross aggression and considers it as an act of war perpetrated by the Israeli government against the unarmed and innocent Palestinian population," a Palestinian statement was quoted by AFP as saying.
The escalation of the violence came after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed two Israeli soldiers the night before, marking the beginning of the end for a US-brokered June 13 truce that neither side has managed to make last on the ground.
"From now on the ceasefire has no meaning," the main umbrella group of Palestinian movements warned after the raid, which killed, among others, 45-year-old Omar Saada, a local official from Hamas.
Meanwhile, Palestinian police arrested five suspected collaborators in Bethlehem accused of helping the Israelis carry out the day's deadly raid, security sources told AFP.
The Israeli army said the target of their attack was a military leader of Hamas, which has claimed the majority of deadly anti-Israeli attacks over the past few years, and that the raid had "prevented with certainty a terror attack against Israelis."
It claimed a Hamas cell was preparing an attack on the Maccabiah Games, the so-called Jewish Olympics which opened in Jerusalem on Monday evening in the shadow of the suicide bombing.
Witnesses said another Hamas member, 40-year-old Taher Al Arouj, was also killed along with two more members of the Saada family, who reportedly had gathered to welcome a relative returning from an Israeli jail.
"The whole family was waiting in the garden," one family member told AFP, adding that nearly 40 people were on the scene at the time. "This was a massacre."
Press reports said that two US-made Apache helicopter gunships fired at least five missiles at the gathering, killing the four and injuring 14, including children.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office said he had called US President George W. Bush and warned that Israel would defend itself in the face of the ongoing violence, which has continued despite the US-brokered ceasefire.
Washington reiterated its call for restraint, said AFP, with State Department spokesman Philip Reeker saying it was "within the power of the parties to bring the level of the violence down.”
But Sharon told members of his right-wing Likud party in Tel Aviv that Israel was "not in a situation of restraint," and "will not hesitate to deal severe blows to terrorists preparing attacks."
Israel has assassinated around 40 pro-independence activists since the Palestinian Intifada was launched in late September. More than 650 people have been killed since then.
The National and Islamic Forces, a coalition of Palestinian groups, said in a statement that all Israeli settlers and soldiers would now be considered targets after the raid on the Saada house.
Meanwhile, Hamas organized demonstrations in the Gaza Strip to protest against the helicopter raids, vowing they will "soon be avenged".
A mortar shell was fired at occupied Jerusalem later Tuesday, in what the army said was the first such attack since the eruption of the Palestinian Intifada, triggering a "retaliatory" helicopter raid on a nearby West Bank village.
A second mortar attack was reported by the army later Tuesday, prompting Israeli to deploy reinforcements of tanks and troops in the West Bank, including around Bethlehem.
Gunbattles between Israelis and Palestinians erupted in the wake of the mortar attacks, wounding three Palestinians.
Meanwhile, the follow-up committee formed by Cairo Arab Summit last October will meet Wednesday, reportedly to discuss an Israeli plan aimed at wiping out the Palestinian Authority and overthrowing its leader, Yasser Arafat.
CLASHES AT ORIENT HOUSE
Tensions rose on Tuesday after Israel banned a meeting at Orient House, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s headquarters in east Jerusalem, commemorating the May death of PLO leader Faisal Husseini.
Palestinians defied the ban and went ahead with the ceremony despite scuffles that broke out briefly with Israeli soldiers.
Arab MKs and the Mufti of Jerusalem had to physically clash with Israeli policemen trying to bar them from entering the headquarters, TV footage showed.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer cancelled a planned visit to the United States, where he had been set to meet with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Also, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish rights group, said German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer had voiced support for Israel's refusal to allow Palestinian refugees an automatic right of return, which could swell the population of the Occupied Territories, according to AFP.
A group member said after meeting with Fischer that the foreign minister had told him he understood Israeli objections to a Palestinian "right of return." The German Foreign Ministry refused to comment on the talks.
Arafat met Tuesday in Gaza with David Satterfield, Washington's new deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, for the second time in less than a week, as the United States continued to press for an end to the "violence," added the agency.
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 125 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 the UK newspaper The Guardian, Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers have killed 13 Arab Israelis and 510 Palestinians with weapons ranging from machineguns and tanks to US-made Apache helicopter gunships and F-16s.
According to an Amnesty International report, 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
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
