Steve Quayle News Alerts

Sept. 3, 2002

JERUSALEM, — In a landmark decision, Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday approved the expulsion of relatives of Palestinian terror suspects.

THE UNANIMOUS ruling by a special nine-judge panel came in the case of three Palestinians whom the Israeli military ordered expelled from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.

The court upheld the expulsions of Intisar and Kifah Ajouri, sister and brother of Ali Ajouri, who allegedly organized several suicide bombings. It blocked the expulsion of Abdel Nasser Asidi, brother of a Hamas activist accused of involvement in two West Bank bus ambushes that killed 19 Israelis.

Ali Ajouri was killed Aug. 6 in an Israeli army attack.

The court said that Intisar and Kifah Ajouri had advance knowledge of the attacks being planned by their brother. The army had said that Intisar Ajouri had sewn the explosives belt used in one of the attacks.

MORE VIOLENCE
In more violence in the region, Israeli tank shells killed two Palestinians in a West Bank village, Palestinian doctors said Tuesday. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

The bodies of Bahir Eid, 22, and Hussein Najar, 22, residents of the village of Burin, were collected by the Red Cross at about 3 a.m. after coordination with Israeli forces in the area, Red Cross officials said.

Hussan Johari, director of the government hospital in Nablus, said one of the bodies was blown to pieces. The other man, was apparently killed by shrapnel or a bullet, Johari said.

Abdel Jabar Najar, the father of Hussein Najar, said his son and Eid would often sit at night in the mountains in the eastern part of the village. He said that at about 9:30 p.m., an explosion was heard, followed by machine-gun fire from the direction of an Israeli army outpost in the nearby Jewish settlement of Bracha.

On Monday, the Palestinians’ top security official on Monday called on Palestinians to shift gears in their struggle against Israel, stopping violence in favor of civil disobedience. The comments came as the current Palestinian uprising nears the two-year mark. Hundreds have been killed in a vicious cycle of attacks and reprisals.

“All forms of Palestinian violence have to stop,” Interior Minister Abdel Razzak al-Yahya, who is overseeing security reforms the United States has demanded in Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, told Reuters in an interview.

“All resistance acts that are characterized by violence, such as using arms or even stones ... are harmful. I call for civil resistance within the framework of the political struggle,” he said.

Yahya repeated a call he first made last week, in remarks to an Israeli newspaper, that Palestinian suicide attacks also must end because they harm the Palestinian cause.

The militant Islamic group Hamas, which has killed scores of people in suicide bombings, has rejected Yahya’s call to end such attacks. Yahya acknowledged in the Reuters interview that the Palestinian Authority was having “great difficulty in regaining full control” of security in Palestinian areas.

ISRAEL ORDERS PROBE
Also on Monday, Israel’s defense minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, ordered a speedy investigation into recent killings of Palestinians, including at least eight civilians, by army fire.

Ben-Eliezer asked the army chief, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, to present by Friday “operative findings to prevent such unfortunate mishaps in the future.”

In radio interviews, Ben-Eliezer again apologized for the killings of civilians, among them a 6-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy and two teenagers.

The deaths, in two incidents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, have outraged Palestinians. Several senior Palestinian officials demanded an end to recent Israeli-Palestinian security talks on a gradual cease-fire.

“After each meeting with the Israelis, a new massacre happens somewhere in the Palestinian territories,” Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said Sunday

Early Thursday, Israeli troops fired a tank shell at a home in the Gaza Strip, killing a mother, her two grown sons and another relative. The army said at the time the troops saw suspicious figures crawling in an area off-limits to civilians and opened fire. It apologized for the killings. The victims’ relatives said troops fired randomly from tanks toward farmers sitting under a fig tree

On Saturday, an Israeli helicopter fired missiles at a car in the West Bank town of Tubas, targeting a senior militant. Instead, a lower-level militant, two teenagers who were in the car with him and two young children playing nearby were killed. The target of the attack escaped.

Four more Palestinians were killed early Sunday. The army said the four were moving in a field farmed by Jews, and soldiers — who were warned that four Palestinians would try to carry out an attack in the area — fired and killed them. Palestinians say the four were laborers killed in cold blood.

Israeli officials, including President Moshe Katsav, have called for the army to investigate the deaths. Others questioned whether soldiers are too quick to shoot.

NBC: Back to school for Palestinians
The deaths follow the July killing of 14 civilians, among them nine children, in an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip. In that incident, the air force targeted senior Hamas militant, Salah Shehadeh, and dropped a one-ton bomb on his home. He was also killed in the attack.

The operation was harshly criticized, including by the United States. But Israel’s air force commander, Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz, defended the strike, saying Shehadeh was responsible for carrying out several attacks against Israelis.

The Islamic group Hamas is responsible for a spate of suicide bombings in Israel that have killed hundreds of civilians in the past two years.

Raanan Gissin, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said the military would not stop hunting suspected militants. “The initiated actions will continue but they (army commanders) will have to look at the way they operate to try to prevent civilian deaths,” Gissin said.

Also Monday, Palestinians fired a mortar shell at a Jewish settlement in the southern Gaza Strip. No injuries or damage were reported, the army said.

Sharon convened senior Cabinet ministers late Sunday to discuss what Gissin called “an escalation of the situation” along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon fired mortar rounds and missiles at Israeli outposts in a disputed area near the border last Thursday, wounding three soldiers. One of the soldiers, Sgt. Ofir Mishal, 20, died of his wounds early Monday.

Mishal is the fifth soldier killed since Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon in May 1999, ending its two-decade occupation of the area.

Hezbollah guerrillas periodically fire on the border area known as Chebaa Farms, which they say belongs to Lebanon. Israel and the United Nations say the uninhabited area belongs to Syria and its status needs to be determined in negotiations between Israel and Damascus.

In other developments:

Sharon has told his Cabinet that if Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat leaves the West Bank, he will not allow him to return, an Israeli newspaper reported Monday.

The Yediot Ahronot daily reported that defense minister Ben-Eliezer disagreed with the prime minister, saying that expelling Arafat would serve to strengthen his international standing, which is currently weak.

Sharon told Cabinet ministers Sunday that Israel had not received a formal request from the Palestinian Authority to allow Arafat to leave, Yediot reported.

Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said Sharon’s comments were “despicable” and accused him of sabotaging peace efforts

http://www.msnbc.com/news/801833.asp