Israeli strikes kill 54 in Gaza By IBRAHIM BARZAK, Associated Press Writer Sat Mar 1, 6:59 PM ET
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Israeli troops turned heavy firepower on rocket squads bombarding southern Israel Saturday, killing 54 Palestinians in the deadliest day in Gaza since the current round of fighting erupted in 2000.
Two Israeli soldiers were killed and seven were wounded in the clashes, the military said.
The violence took a heavy toll on Gaza civilians. Moderate Palestinian leaders called the killings a "genocide" and threatened to call off peace talks.
"The response to these rockets can't be that harsh and heinous," said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "It is nowadays described as a holocaust."
The spasm of violence came days before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to arrive in the region to nudge Israel and Palestinians closer to a peace accord. But the rising tensions threatened to mar her visit.
Early Sunday, Israeli aircraft destroyed the office building in Gaza City used by Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, witnesses said. Five people were lightly wounded in the raid, seen as a signal that Israel holds the Hamas political leadership responsible for the violence.
While expressing regret for civilian casualties, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak blamed "Hamas and those firing rockets at Israel," his office said in a statement, pledging to continue the offensive to protect Israeli towns and cities.
On Friday, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai renewed a threat to invade Gaza to crush militant rocket squads that attack southern Israel daily.
At least two dozen Palestinian civilians, including a baby, were among those killed, and militants said 25 fighters died. Health officials said about 200 people were wounded, 14 of them critically.
The overall death toll was the highest in a single day since the current round of violence erupted in September 2000. The highest previous death toll was 38 on March 8, 2002.
The intense fighting Saturday pushed the Palestinian death toll to more than 80 since fighting flared Wednesday. About half of those were civilians.
Palestinian fighters kept up a steady stream of rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli targets, firing around 50 on Saturday alone in defiance of the Israeli assault. Six Israelis were injured by rockets that reached as far as Ashkelon, a coastal city 11 miles north of Gaza.
The Israeli military said one of its airstrikes on northern Gaza targeted a parked truck loaded with 160 rockets.
On Thursday, militants raised the stakes by firing Iranian-made rockets into Ashkelon, striking closer to Israel's heartland than ever before and putting more Israelis at risk. Palestinian rocket fire earlier in the week also killed an Israeli man.
Shortly before midnight Friday in the northern town of Beit Hanoun, a 13-month-old girl was killed by shrapnel. Hamas blamed Israel, but residents said a militant rocket fell short and landed near the baby's house. The day's violence snowballed from that point on.
Before dawn Saturday, the battleground shifted to the town of Jebaliya and its nearby refugee camp, a center of militant activity in northern Gaza.
Soldiers backed by tanks and aircraft conducted house-to-house searches and took up positions on rooftops as they clashed with militants detonating land mines and firing heavy machine guns, assault rifles and mortar rounds.
A wounded man and boy lay in a gutter near a dead man. Ambulance workers took away the dead man as a youth appealed to paramedics to treat the wounded.
"Take them, they are still alive," he pleaded. Another man urged the wounded to "bear witness," or proclaim their Muslim faith before they die. The two began reciting a Muslim prayer near a boy whose lower body was ripped by shrapnel.
Tareq Dardouna, a Jebaliya resident, said a relative was killed outside his home in the crossfire that began at 3 a.m.
"His body is still on the ground," Dardouna said in a telephone interview from his home, where he was tending to four wounded people amid screaming children. "Ambulances tried to come, but they came under fire. ... We are in a real war."
Two sisters and another civilian were killed by tank shells that struck two houses in separate attacks in Jebaliya, Palestinian officials said.
At one of the damaged houses, paramedics rushed an unmoving woman lying on a stretcher, her face covered with a cloth, out of a room clouded with dust.
By evening, more than 40 Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers had been killed in the Jebaliya fighting.
All but the most critically injured were sent home from Shifa Hospital, Gaza's largest. Beds crammed hospital corridors, and the intensive care unit was overflowing, a doctor at the hospital said. The doctors union urged its members to cancel leaves and appealed for blood donations.
The U.N. shuttered 37 schools it runs in northern Gaza because of the fighting, affecting some 40,000 students said Christopher Gunness, a U.N. official. A three-day strike was declared in Gaza, and publicly run schools and universities were closed.
Mosques across northern Gaza and Hamas-affiliated radio appealed to civilians to stay home. Hamas closed off roads to evacuate security compounds and to keep residents away from potential airstrike targets. They also turned off street lights, apparently so militants wouldn't be seen from the air.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia said Palestinian leaders including Abbas recommended suspending peace talks at a meeting Saturday in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
"I think it will be suspended," Qureia said. "What is happening in Gaza is a massacre of civilians, women and children, a collective killing, genocide," Qureia added. "We can't bear what the Israelis are doing, and what the Israelis are doing doesn't led the peace process any credibility."
Hamas remained defiant and vowed to retaliate.
In Syria, exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal described Israeli attacks against civilians in Gaza as "the real Holocaust."
"If (Israeli officials) decided stupidly to invade Gaza, we will fight them with God's help," Mashaal told reporters from his base in Damascus. "We will fight them like lions."
Mashaal blamed the rival Fatah, headed by Abbas, for helping along Israel's attacks.
"I accuse the president of the Palestinian Authority of providing coverage of this holocaust in Gaza," Mashaal said. Hamas has said Abbas' condemnation of rocket fire has given a pretext to Israel's assault on Gaza.
Israeli officials met Saturday to discuss the Gaza violence and its implications for peacemaking. Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said talks didn't preclude fighting. Talks are "based on the understanding that when advancing the peace process with pragmatic (Palestinian) sources, Israel will continue to fight terror that hurts its people," he said.
Vice Premier Haim Ramon told Channel 2 TV that Israel should fight in Gaza, but not reoccupy it. Israel pulled its troops and settlers out of the tiny seaside territory in late 2005, but militants proceeded to fire rockets from the abandoned territory at Israeli communities.
Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, took control of Gaza by force from the rival Fatah in June.
Israeli government spokesman David Baker said Israel was "compelled to continue to take these defensive measures" to protect more than 200,000 Israelis living under the threat of Palestinian rocket barrages.
Militants "hide behind their own civilians, using them as human shields, while actively targeting Israeli population centers," Baker said. "They bear the responsibility for the results."
Israeli military spokeswoman Maj. Avital Leibovich called Saturday's action a "pinpoint operation" provoked by the rocket attack on Ashkelon earlier in the week. She blamed the high civilian toll on Hamas' practice of using homes to store and produce projectiles.
"We are not targeting homes and we have no intentions of targeting uninvolved civilians," she said. "We will target launchers and Hamas militants, and bunkers."
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which had been in a deep freeze for seven years, resumed in November at a U.S.-sponsored conference. At the gathering, the two sides pledged to try to reach an accord by the end of this year. In recent weeks, negotiators have met almost daily.
But even when violence is at a lower level, Abbas' efforts are compromised by the fact that he only rules the West Bank, while Gaza is controlled by Hamas. And Israel's fragile government would be hard pressed to make concessions to the Palestinians while Gaza militants pummel southern Israel.
Barred From Main Road, Palestinians Fear Two-Tiered System
By ETHAN BRONNER Published: March 28, 2008
BEIT SIRA, West Bank — Ali Abu Safia, mayor of this Palestinian village, steers his car up one potholed road, then another, finding each exit blocked by huge concrete chunks placed there by the Israeli Army. On a sleek highway 100 yards away, Israeli cars whiz by.
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times Israeli soldiers recently monitored access to A Tira, a village in the West Bank, via Highway 443, in the background. More Photos » Multimedia Highway 443Slide Show .. inside ..
“They took our land to build this road, and now we can’t even use it,” Mr. Abu Safia says bitterly, pointing to the highway with one hand as he drives with the other. “Israel says it is because of security. But it’s politics.”
The object of Mr. Abu Safia’s contempt — Highway 443, a major access road to Jerusalem — has taken on special significance in the grinding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For the first time, the Supreme Court, albeit in an interim decision, has accepted the idea of separate roads for Palestinians in the occupied areas.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel told the Supreme Court that what was happening on the highway could be the onset of legal apartheid in the West Bank — a charge that makes many Israelis recoil.
Built largely on private Palestinian land, the road was first challenged in the Supreme Court in the early 1980s when the justices, in a landmark ruling, permitted it to be built because the army said its primary function was to serve the local Palestinians, not Israeli commuters. In recent years, in the wake of stone-throwing and several drive-by shootings, Israel has blocked Palestinians’ access to the road.
This month, as some 40,000 Israeli cars — and almost no Palestinians — use it daily, the court handed down its decision, one that has engendered much legal and political hand-wringing.
The one-paragraph decision calls on the army to give a progress report in six months on its efforts to build separate roads and take other steps for the Palestinians to compensate them for being barred from Highway 443. It is the acceptance of the idea of separate road systems that has engendered commentary, although legal experts say there is a slight chance that the court could reconsider its approach when it next examines the issue.
“There is already a separate legal system in the territories for Israelis and Palestinians,” said Limor Yehuda, who argued the recent case for the civil rights association on behalf of six Palestinian villages. “With the approval of separate roads, if it becomes a widespread policy, then the word for it will be ‘apartheid.’ ”
Many Israelis and their supporters reject the term, with its implication of racist animus.
“The basis of separation is not ethnic since Israeli Arabs and Jerusalem residents with Israeli ID cards can use the road,” argues Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a conservative research organization. “The basis of the separation is to keep out of secure areas people living in chaotic areas. If the Palestinian Authority, which has thousands of men under arms, had fought terror, this wouldn’t have been necessary.”
The court’s latest decision is significant because it accepted the idea in principle put forth by the army — that while it had no choice but to ban Palestinian traffic from the road because of anti-Israel attacks on it, some of which it says originated from the surrounding villages, it would build separate roads for the Palestinians.
The court has never ruled on the legality of separate roads, despite a growing network of them around the West Bank. If this interim decision reflects its view that such a system is legally acceptable, that represents a big new step. A court spokeswoman said the justices would not comment.
David Kretzmer, an emeritus professor of international law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote in an op-ed article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz of what he called the “judicial hypocrisy” of Israel’s reign over the territories manifest in this case.
He said that while the changed security circumstances of recent years may have forced a change in the road’s mixed use, “the unavoidable conclusion is that, as unfortunate as this may be, Israelis should not be allowed to travel on the road that was built, let’s not forget, for the benefit of the local population.
“But the military government has, of course, decided otherwise: Israelis will be allowed to travel on the road, while Palestinians — for whom, the court’s ruling says, the road was paved — cannot use it, and access to the road from local Palestinian villages will be blocked.”
For many Israelis, however, the dozens of attacks that have taken place on the road in recent years are reason enough to ban Palestinian traffic there and to limit Palestinians to other routes. In 2001, for example, five Israelis were killed by gunfire on Highway 443 and since then a number of others have been injured from stone-throwing. Next Page » http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/world/middleeast/28road.html?pagewanted=2&ref=world
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