Israeli official compares Rafah actions to Nazis
U.N. official condemns demotion of Palestinian homes
JERUSALEM - An Israeli Cabinet minister on Sunday said the army's demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip reminded him of actions the Nazis took against his family during World War Two and called for a halt to the policy of destroying homes.
The remarks by Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor, sparked an uproar at the weekly Cabinet meeting, officials at the meeting said.
The ministers were discussing Israel's demolition of homes in the Rafah refugee camp. Dozens of homes have been destroyed or damaged during an ongoing offensive along the Gaza-Egypt border.
Lapid was quoted by officials at the meeting as saying a picture of an old Palestinian woman on the rubble of her home reminded him "of my grandmother in the Holocaust."
The statement outraged hard-line Likud Party ministers, who demanded he recant.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said such comments add "oil to the fire of incitement."
Lapid said he was not comparing Israel to the Nazis but there "is no forgiveness for people who treat an old woman in this way."
3-year-old killed
A 3-year-old Palestinian girl was shot and killed in in Rafah on Saturday, the fifth day of Israeli searches and house demolitions that a senior U.N. official condemned as “completely, completely unacceptable.”
In the West Bank, meanwhile, four people were wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near an Israeli army checkpoint.
Israeli troops entered the outskirts of the southern Gaza town of Rafah overnight, pressing their offensive in search of arms-smuggling tunnels and militants. The military said 90 tunnels have been found and destroyed since 2000, though only one has been discovered during the current operation.
On Friday, the army pulled back from two neighborhoods of the refugee camp next to the town, leaving behind dozens of damaged or destroyed buildings, torn-up roads and flattened cars. The army said it was redeploying forces and the offensive would continue.
Forty-one Palestinians have been killed since “Operation Rainbow” began Tuesday, including gunmen and eight demonstrators hit by a tank shell during a protest march.
The 3-year-old girl was shot dead Saturday in the camp’s Brazil neighborhood, from which troops had withdrawn the day before, Palestinian hospital officials said. Relatives said Rawan Mohammed Abu Zeid was killed by a gunshot to the head as she walked to a shop.
“We were playing in the house when she told me she wanted some candy,” said her brother Diyab Abu Zeid, 19, crying uncontrollably on the telephone. “The older kids in the neighborhood were going to the store so I let her go with them.
“There was no one in the street but the kids, not even other adults,” he added.
The army said it had no reports of shots being fired in the area.
Israeli armor move into position
Israeli tanks, bulldozers and jeeps moved overnight into a sparsely populated area at the eastern entrance to Rafah town, witnesses and Palestinian security officials said. Witnesses said the army used loudspeakers to tell male residents to come out of their homes. The army had no immediate comment.
Farmer Barak Abu Halaweh, 40, said armored vehicles flattened vegetable greenhouses and chicken coops and ordered him and his family of 15 to leave their house for three days.
Rafah camp’s Tel Sultan neighborhood, one of the worst-affected areas, remained without water and electricity, and sewage flooded the streets.
The Red Cross said the Israeli army had allowed engineers into the area to restore water and sewage-treatment facilities.
Despite sporadic gunfire, camp residents took advantage of the lull in fighting to retrieve possessions from demolished homes. A few shops opened so that residents could stock up, and people ventured tentatively outside, waving white flags and strips of cloth.
Alternative to demolition?
While the army vowed to continue the incursion, Israeli officials indicated they were looking for an alternative to the mass demolition of Palestinian homes.
A key objective of the military operation is the widening of an Israeli patrol road between Rafah and the Egyptian border, which would make it more difficult for weapons smugglers to dig tunnels.
Widening the road would require the demolition of dozens of Palestinian houses, a plan criticized by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States.
Peter Hansen, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, toured a street littered with clothes, mattresses and the collapsed corrugated tin roofs of devastated houses. Some Palestinians have said house demolitions have occurred with residents still inside.
“I think that the destruction is probably even worse than I’ve seen ... and is indeed completely, completely unacceptable,” Hansen said. “The destruction is unacceptable, but the destruction of these places with people inside, putting their lives at risk, is just not acceptable.”
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Over the past 10 days, including a brief Israeli incursion into Rafah last week, 1,650 Palestinians have been made homeless, Hansen said, compared with more than 11,000 Rafah residents left homeless from Israeli demolitions since 2000.
Municipal officials said at least 43 homes have been demolished and dozens more damaged in the camp this week. The army said five houses were demolished after they were used as cover by militants to attack troops.
Army spokeswoman Maj. Sharon Feingold said troops had detained “dozens” of Palestinians, including suspected senior militants, and killed a local leader of the armed group Hamas.
During more than three years of Palestinian-Israeli violence, Israeli forces have made dozens of forays into the Rafah camp to destroy tunnels used to smuggle weapons across the nearby Egyptian border.
Palestinian officials said Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman would meet Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Monday, presumably to discuss the crisis in Rafah. Israel has accused Egypt of not doing enough to halt the smuggling across its border with Gaza.
The suicide bomber blew himself up at an Israeli army checkpoint east of the West Bank city of Nablus Saturday, killing himself and wounding one soldier and three Palestinians, the Israeli military and paramedics said.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine militant group claimed responsibility for the bombing in a call to The Associated Press, calling it a response to the Rafah incursion. The group said the bomber was a 19-year-old man from Nablus. |
