Israel Dragging Feet on Jenin Massacre Probe
The Israeli officials on Tuesday withdrew their agreement for a UN fact-finding mission to investigate the Israeli army's carnage in Jenin. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and defense minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer notified the United Nations overnight that they had changed their mind about the mission because they thought the team members were prejudiced against Israel!
They later told UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that they would admit the team only if it included military and counter-terrorism experts!
And now Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres has come up with new conditions for allowing the UN fact-finding team to visit the Jenin refugee camp, the scene of the worst Israeli atrocities against defenseless Palestinians.
According to the yesterday's edition of the Arabic language **Al-Hayat** daily, the Israeli foreign minister's first condition is that the team should include a counter-terrorism expert, but the second condition requires that the testimony of the Israelis should not be used against the Zionist regime!
The third condition, which is even more interesting than the second one, demands that Israel should not be prosecuted at the international tribunal at The Hague!
These conditions show that the Israeli officials are quite sure that the visit by the UN fact-finding team would reveal the extent of their crimes in Jenin, and that the visit will be followed by an international call for the prosecution of Israel for its crimes against innocent Palestinians. Thus, these conditions have been set to render the visit ineffective if it is finally taken under UN pressure.
Israeli troops on Friday launched a pre-dawn incursion into the autonomous West Bank town of Qalqilya and detained up to 20 Palestinian suspects.
The militants, suspected of taking part in anti-Israeli attacks, were picked up in Qalqilya as well as three villages between the West Bank towns of Nablus and Jenin, a Zionist military spokesman said.
Witnesses said soldiers supported by around 15 armored vehicles and two helicopters entered Qalqilya and arrested two senior local members of the Palestinian group, Hamas.
In the village of Jaba, near Jenin, the army arrested 10 people linked to the Palestinian security forces or to Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah Movement, said the sources.
In another development Israeli troops and tanks launched an incursion into an autonomous Palestinian area of the West Bank town of Al-Khalil overnight, to conduct searches and make arrests, residents said early Thursday.
Twenty tanks, armored cars and troop carriers penetrated around one kilometer inside the towns northwest sector, near the local university, witnesses said.
There was a brief exchange of gunfire in the sector after the troops arrived.
Given the relatively small number of troops engaged in the operation -- around 200 -- the action did not appear to signal the start of a prolonged occupation, according to Palestinian security sources.
On Monday, Israeli troops killed Marwan Zallun, the local Al-Khalil leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an offshoot of Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah group.
Zallun and a member of Arafat's Force 17 Presidential Guard were targetted in their car by a helicopter gunship in Palestinian-controlled Al-Khalil.
Zallun, the Al-Khalil leader of Al-Aqsa, had been accused by Israel of mounting a series of attacks against Jewish settlers.
Following his death, three Palestinians branded collaborators with Israel were executed at the spot where the two men were found dead.
Under an agreement with the Palestinian Authority, Israeli forces vacated 80 percent of Al-Khalil in 1997, while maintaining control of an enclave where 400 Jewish settlements stand.
Al-Khalil is the only major Palestinian West Bank town not to have been reoccupied during "Operation Defensive Shield" launched by Israeli forces on March 29.
Two U.S. trucks delivering food, toys and tents to the Jenin refugee camp were turned away by an angry crowd Thursday in protest at Washington's military aid to the Israeli army, Jenin's parliamentarian told AFP.
"The camp's inhabitants are refusing help provided by the U.S. because of its foreign policy concerning the Palestinian question and because the camp was destroyed by U.S.-made weapons," the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) member for Jenin, Jamal Al-Shaati said.
A large crowd of the camp's residents, including representatives of all political factions there, threw the goods back into the trucks after they had been unloaded at the camp's entrance, Shaati said.
U.S. aid officials in Tel Aviv said they were not aware of the incident.