And that is with the Palestinians just trying to kill Israelis while the Israelis are trying to kill Palestinian terrorists. If the Israelis took the same attitude towards killing Palestinians that the Palestinians take towards killing Israelis, or even the attitude that the US took towards killing Germans and Japanese during World War II then the ration would be far more then 4 to 1.
<font color=brown>Do you honestly believe the Israeli approach is more humane? And if the Israelis think that this approach will work, they are fooling themselves. Such punitive behavior hardly works with children let alone adults.<font color=black>
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In 5th Day of Gaza Incursion, a Girl, 3, Is Shot Dead
By ALAN COWELL
Published: May 23, 2004
GAZA CITY, May 22 - As one of Israel's most powerful incursions into the Gaza Strip entered a fifth day, Palestinian officials said a 3-year-old girl was shot dead in the Rafah refugee camp on Saturday as thousands more people remained holed up in their homes, saying they were short of water, food and even battery power for their cellphones.
Israeli forces slowed their offensive on Friday, thinning out some troops but redeploying and rotating others so that two areas of the vast Rafah refugee camp on the border with Egypt remained difficult to enter or leave, witnesses said, with tanks deployed around parts of the Brazil and Tel Sultan neighborhoods.
An Israeli general said the apparent pause was designed to "re-energize" the troops, who went into Rafah after the killing of Israeli soldiers in Gaza last week.
"My family is still in there," Khaled Abu Ghali, 40, a health worker who spoke to a reporter by telephone from a hideaway close to Tel Sultan, said on Saturday. "The tanks are still there. My family say they have no electricity, no water. And the battery on their phone ran out."
Others said the incursion, using bulldozers and tanks to cut a swath through parts of the crowded area, had severed telephone and electric lines and smashed sewage pipes. It has not been possible for reporters to verify these accounts because the area has remained cordoned off by Israeli troops.
In the West Bank on Saturday, a military spokeswoman said a suicide bomber ignored warning shots at a checkpoint east of Nablus and blew himself up, slightly wounding an Israeli soldier and two Palestinians. A third Palestinian was seriously wounded, the spokeswoman said.
Israel says the strike in Gaza is designed to close off arms smuggling routes through tunnels from Egypt and to strike a blow at armed Palestinian militants in the area - a focus of fierce resistance to Israeli occupation. But the attack seemed to lose some momentum on Wednesday when, according to the Israeli Army, tanks fired four rounds to deter civilian protesters and killed eight of them. The killings provoked a huge international outcry.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said troops in Rafah located a smugglers' tunnel in the camp on Saturday - the first confirmed discovery since the incursion began. The tunnel was said to be 25 feet deep and contained explosives. The spokeswoman said it was the 12th tunnel discovered this year out of more than 90 located since the latest Palestinian uprising began in 2000.
In the latest fatality, Palestinian health workers and witnesses said, Rawan Abu Zeid, 3, was killed when she was hit in the head and neck by two bullets when she left her home in the Brazil area of Rafah to go to a nearby shop with some older children to buy candy.
The Israeli Army said it was checking the report. Over 40 Palestinians have died since the incursion began. According to Reuters, reporters on a tour of the area on Saturday with Peter Hansen, chief of the United Nations agency for refugees in the region, heard gunshots before the girl was killed. Mr. Hansen was quoted as saying: "We have now confirmation from the hospital that a girl was shot and killed in one of the two gun bursts we heard."
<b."There are 25,000 people under closure," said Sahid Zughrub, the mayor of Rafah, speaking of people in the Tel Sultan area. "They need medicine, clean water. Yesterday the Israelis allowed us to get some food and water in but it was not enough." Others said Israeli soldiers had permitted some stores to open briefly but they soon ran out of goods to sell.
Hemmed in, many people have taken to listening to battery-powered radios for news, advice and to make their feelings known to the outside world. According to Tawfik Abu Khosa, the manager of a Gaza City-based station, Voice of Freedom, one Palestinian woman called to say she had gone into labor during the siege of Rafah and did not know what to do. "She called and said, 'I'm about to give birth and there's no one to help me.' Our listeners in their cars and homes could hear. We put her in touch with someone to give her advice," Mr. Abu Khosa said.
Moawiya Hassanein, a physician in Gaza City, said on the same radio station that 39 boys had been born in Rafah since the incursion began and quoted Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, as saying he was "so happy because the births were some compensation for the human loss." Dr. Hassanein did not say how many girls were born.
Others used the station to vent rage that has built not just against Israel but also against the United States because of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad. In a fiery speech on Friday a leader of Hamas said that "American terrorism is fueling Zionist terrorism."
One woman called the Voice of Freedom radio on Saturday to recite a poem evoking Palestinian anger at Arab states, which some Palestinians feel have been slow to condemn or act against the Israeli incursion.
"Where are you, Arabs, where are you from Islam, how long will you be in your deep sleep?" the poem said. "And do not say: We will go back to negotiations, for negotiations have separated father from son."
nytimes.com |
