Israel, siege to refugee camps

JERUSALEM – Despite international protests ranging from the United States to Europe to the UN, Israel continues its offensive against Palestinian refugee camps. “The goal is to show terrorists that they have no place to hide, that our army can arrive wherever there is a threat to national security,” says General Gershon Yitzhak, satisfied with the progress of the operation. But among the six dead and forty injured yesterday, at least two were certainly not terrorists: an 8-year-old girl named Maria, hit by a gust while standing at the window, and a 7-year-old boy named Mohammed, joined by the machine gun of a tank while playing in front of the house. In all, in 48 hours the attack caused twenty deaths and two hundred wounded among the Palestinians. Israeli losses are more contained: two soldiers have lost their lives, the injured are half a dozen. On Thursday the blitz focused on Balata, the Nablus refugee camp; On Friday, the epicenter of the battle moved to the Jenin refugee camp, extending also to the Gaza strip. International reactions are harsh. “Israeli forces must immediately leave the Palestinian camps,” said UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. “These are serious actions of war, we warn Israel against the consequences they entail,” protested the French Foreign Minister Vedrine. More diplomatically, the United States expresses “concern”, asking Israel to “do everything possible not to hit the civilian population”. But Yasser Arafat asks the world “for immediate intervention, before the entire region collapses into chaos”. Israel defends the initiative as a necessary step to destroy the bases of terror. “It is the attempt to dismantle a bomb before it can do damage”, even the “dove” of the Sharon government, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, says. But not everyone agrees. According to military radio, senior military officials have criticized the operation as a “spectacular show that produces nothing and does not eradicate terrorism”. Dissent must be real, if he pushed Defense Minister Ben Eliezer to take it publicly with “anyone who criticizes an operation internally, especially if it is still in progress”. It is undeniable that the two refugee camps attacked in the last two days are the cornerstones of the Palestinian revolt: they were also at the time of the first Intifada in the 1980s, at least sixty suicide bombers left Nablus and Jenin during the current one. Not for nothing the Jenin refugee camp, where 15 thousand people live, is nicknamed “Tora Bora” by its inhabitants: like the mountain of Afghanistan where bin Laden was hiding. But attacking the fields, a Jerusalem newspaper writes, turned out to be “a dangerous bet, rather than a calculated risk”.

March 2 2002