Posted on 12/13/2001 8:49:39 AM PST by veronica
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has gone into hiding after an Israeli missile attack damaged his headquarters here earlier today.
Israel's military launched a major offensive meant to destroy the Palestinian Authority security and weapons infrastructure in the wake of a Palestinian attack on a Jewish community in the West Bank. Ten Israelis were killed in the Palestinian ambush on an Israeli bus at the entrance to the Jewish settlement of Emanuel on Wednesday evening.
PA sources said Arafat was evacuated from his Ramallah headquarters on early Thursday and taken to a secret location. The sources said the complex was damaged by an Israeli missile attack, Middle East Newsline reported.
Arafat has prepared an underground bunker in the Ramallah area to survive any Israeli attack, PA sources said. Other bunkers were built for Arafat in the Gaza Strip.
On Thursday, the PA's Voice of Palestine ended transmissions and Palestinian sources said the radio and television broadcast station was destroyed by Israeli tank fire. Both radio and television broadcasts later continued via other facilities.
Israeli air and ground forces operated throughout early Thursday in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The targets included the Palestinian weapons industry in the West Bank city of Nablus.
"We also struck the Palestinian Scientific Committee, the code-word for the Palestinian weapons industry," Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, head of the military's operations directorate, said. "There, they produce weapons and bombs."
Israeli troops have also entered several Palestinian areas in the Gaza Strip. The radar facility at the moribund PA airport at Dahaniya was destroyed. The Gaza Strip was divided into three separate cantons controlled by the military.
Israeli AH-64A helicopters and F-16 multi-role fighters struck PA police and naval installations throughout Gaza. Israeli tanks shelled several West Bank cities.
The Cabinet of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that Israel would sever all relations with PA Chairman Yasser Arafat. But the ministers did not decide to exile or assassinate Arafat.
"We have reached a point where Arafat no longer serves as an address to deal with terrorism," Israeli Justice Minister Meir Shetreet said.
Before his departure, Arafat ordered the closure of the offices of the Islamic opposition in a last-minute move to stave off the toppling of his regime. PA sources said security officers arrived at several Hamas and Jihad offices to prevent them opening.
But Islamic opposition sources dismissed the Arafat decision. The sources said the Hamas and Jihad offices were scheduled to be closed over the weekend for the Id El Fitr holiday, which marks the end of the Muslim fast month of Ramadan.
Hours later on Thursday afternoon, PA officials announced that Arafat had rescinded the closure order. The officials said the rescinding of the order was in response to the Israeli military offensive against the PA.
Palestinian sources said U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Western leaders telephoned Arafat and appealed to him to crack down on Palestinian insurgents. The sources said PA officials sent messages to both Israel and the United States urging a halt in Israeli bombing to allow Arafat to round up suspected Palestinian insurgents.
In Washington, the Bush administration said Israel has not relayed to the United States any intention to destroy the PA or exile Arafat. Assistant Secretary of State William Burns — on tour of North African Arab states — said the United States would continue to negotiate with Arafat. "The United States has not seen any indication that Israel is trying to get Yasser Arafat," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
The Israeli offensive came hours after Palestinian insurgents from Hamas as well as Arafat's Fatah movement attacked the Jewish settlement of Emanuel. Ten people were killed and more than 30 were injured when a commuter bus was bombed and riddled with bullets at the entrance of the community. Print this Article Email this article Free Headline Alerts
13 December:
With another 10 Israelis dead and 22 still in hospital from the latest Palestinian terror outrage Wednesday, the Israeli defense cabinet’s ruling in a special session that the Palestinian Authority is “no longer relevant to the State of Israel” sounds feeble, bureaucratic and evasive. The very phrasing will intensify popular pressure on the Sharon government to go all the way against Yasser Arafat and his regime. Demonstrations are scheduled to demand the resignation from the government of right-wing ministers, unless Yasser Arafat is expelled and the West Bank re-occupied without further delay Bitter parallels are drawn between Ariel Sharon and President George W. Bush who, if he acted on the Israeli model, would have declared bin Laden irrelevant and broken off contact with al Qaeda at Tora Bora…
Sharon is reminded that he rode in to office last February on the “security for every Israeli” ticket. The first 12 days of December were a dismal landmark: 40 Israelis died in terror attacks – all civilians but one, and more than half, children and teenagers. Dozens remain in hospital. For the first time since Arafat launched his confrontation with Israel nearly 15 months ago, the Israeli death toll has exceeded that of the Palestinians.
Before Israel tagged him “irrelevant”, Arafat ordered the closure of all the offices of the violent Islamic groups Hamas and Jihad Islami – an order that drew a laugh from Hamas spokesmen. Their offices are closed on Ramadan anyway and most of their activity is conducted underground. Arafat refrained from even that ironic gesture until Israeli F-16s and helicopter gunships were overhead Wednesday night, three hours after the bombing-shooting-grenade assault hit a packed bus going into the West Bank settlement of Immanual near Nablus.
The targets of the Israeli air force were all Palestinian Authority military installations, Arafat’s own presidential guard Force 17 HQ in Gaza City and an explosives manufacturing facility in Nablus. Intermittently, through the night, a helipad was torn up in Nablus, Palestinian Radio’s mast knocked down near Arafat’s compound in Ramallah – he was evacuated a few minutes earlier – and Gaza international airport’s radar tower was destroyed. Thursday morning, Israeli troop incursions have begun in Ramallah and in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. Several Palestinians were injured in the aerial bombing runs.
Israeli military activity Wednesday night and Thursday is the preamble to a wider operation implicit in the severance of contacts with the Palestinian Authority, its commanders and its head. Future meetings, including those of the tripartite security commission chaired by a US officer, will be boycotted. The last three were hosted by US envoy General Anthony Zinni, each punctuated by escalating terror attacks and the Palestinian leader’s refusal to heed mounting international demands to halt the violence and detain its perpetrators.
The difference from Thursday morning, December 13, is that Israel will cease addressing its demands to Arafat; its troops will do the job themselves “as though the PA is non-existent”. Their first missions are to drive deeper than ever before into Palestinian cities and large villages, to “deal with” terrorist cells on the spot, instead of indirectly. The 270 IDF roadblocks in the West Bank have proved unequal to the task of stemming terrorist activity. If the Palestinian Authority collapses under this military pressure, so be it. It has been formally ruled “irrelevant”, although its salaried “security” officers are as deeply engaged in terror as the blacklisted Islamic groups.
Indeed, according to DEBKAfile’s military sources,the Immanuel attack, like most of the terrorist operations this month, was carried out by a combination of forces and groups, using their best resources. Its Lebanese characteristics, directed now against civilians, are further evidence that Arafat actively employs Hizballah “experts”, instructors, bomb-makers and tacticians. The first targets for deep Israeli incursions are the 5 Palestinian villages around Immanuel. After one assailant in the latest attack was shot dead, the remaining two slipped through the net thrown down by Israeli troops. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli tanks have gone back to the oft-tried stranglehold maneuver of severing the territory into three impassable “cantons”.
But with Israeli troops assigned to lengthy and complicated missions inside Palestinian areas, there are urgent questions for the Sharon government to address: How long must they stay to make sure terrorist purges hold? Must they continue to go in every time the terror tide rises and then leave? When does a prolonged stay become reoccupation? - which many military experts and right-wing politicians say that the rising campaign of terror has made unavoidable. How can this campaign be fought effectively with euphemisms that dodge defining the crisis as war and the Palestinian Authority as the enemy? And how much more bloodletting can the ordinary Israeli endure?
A Belgian court will today decide whether to try Ariel Sharon for war crimes. Julie Flint uncovers secret documents that detail Israel's involvement in the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila
Julie Flint
Guardian
Wednesday November 28, 2001
It is September 19 1982, the day after the Lebanese Forces militia left Beirut's Palestinian camps after a 38-hour orgy of killing, and it is finally possible to see what the Israeli soldiers surrounding the camps claimed they had been unable to see. Streets carpeted with bodies. Men, women and children shot and hacked to death. Pregnant women eviscerated. In Christian East Beirut, Israel's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Rafael Eitan, the commander of the Northern District, Major General Amir Drori, and a senior Mossad officer, Menahem Navot, codenamed Mr R, meet the deputy chief of staff of the Lebanese Forces, Antoine Breidi - "Toto" - and Joseph abu Khalil, the man who made the first contact with the Israelis in March 1976. What ensues is a cynical damage-limitation conference in which senior officers of the Israeli Defence Forces utter not one word of reproach for a massacre in which mili tiamen trained, armed and sent into the camps by them killed at least 900 defenceless civilians.
Gen Eitan: "Everybody points an accusing finger at Israel and the outcome might be that the IDF will be forced to withdraw from Beirut. Therefore some of you have to explain the subject and immediately. The formula should be that they [the Lebanese Forces] took part in an assignment and that whatever occurred was out of their control."
Gen Drori: "On this occasion you should mention also what happened at Damour [a Christian village where fighters including Palestinians killed 200 civilians in 1976]. Also to mention the fact that this is not your policy. You could mention that in the places that they entered there were battles between rival sides inside the camps and not only with the Phalangists [the LF's political umbrella]."
Abu Khalil: "... You tell us and we will carry it out."
And so it goes on - a web of evasions and untruths concocted by the IDF, which sent 200 Lebanese militiamen into Sabra and Shatila on September 16 to "mop up" 2,000 "terrorists" who Ariel Sharon, then Israel's defence minister, claimed had remained there after the PLO's evacuation from Beirut. It is an encounter that shows the intimacy between the IDF and the LF, even after the massacre, and the virtual incorporation of the LF into the IDF structure.
Two almost identical reports of this meeting - one identified as "a transcript of a conversation recorded by an aide to the commander of the Northern District"; the other as "Minutes of Mossad (4222) of a meeting between Israeli chief of staff and Gen Drori with Toto" - are among a stack of documents delivered to lawyers seeking to bring Sharon, now Israel's prime minister, to trial in Belgium for war crimes committed in Lebanon 19 years ago when he had overall responsibility for the IDF.
The documents, exclusively obtained by the Guardian, cover the period between June and November 1982 - from a meeting in which "the cabinet has decided to have the Lebanese army and the Phalangists participate in the entering of Beirut" to the testimony to Israel's Kahan commission of inquiry of a senior military intelligence officer, Colonel Elkana Harnof. Some are in Hebrew; others in English. Michael Verhaeghe, one of three lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the case against Sharon, has little doubt about the documents' authenticity. They arrived anonymously in June, within 10 days of the suit being lodged under legislation that allows Belgium to prosecute foreigners for war crimes, wherever they were committed.
"The documents give a very detailed account of a number of events which would be very difficult to fabricate - especially in that very short period of time," says Verhaeghe. Investigations by the Guardian in Israel and Lebanon have confirmed the identity of the intelligence officers named in the documents as well as the dates, times and locations of some of the meetings, those who attended them and some of their content. The typescript of the Hebrew documents matches that used at the time of Kahan. And the voices of many of the protagonists are unmistakable - among them the courtly Pierre Gemayel, patriarch of the Gemayel family, and Sharon, referred to throughout as DM.
Thus, from minutes of a meeting on August 21 at Gemayel's home in Bikfaya: Pierre: "I visited Israel several times. I was very impressed." DM: "How to create power and how to convey its presence is the great test. We were 18 million, six million were exterminated... The use of power is what I want to discuss with you."
The lawyers say the documents' importance lies in recurring evidence that the IDF had "command responsibility" for the Lebanese Forces before, during and after the massacre. Thus, according to a summary of a meeting in which "the capture of Beirut" was discussed with LF leaders on July 13, Gen Eitan "explained that the IDF would provide all the necessary support: artillery, air etc as if they were regular IDF units".
"Under the established law of command responsibility - also known as indirect responsibility - this is watertight evidence of the conscious and effective chain of command," says Chibli Mallat, one of Verhaeghe's colleagues.
In February 1983, the Kahan commission found that no Israeli was "directly responsible" for the massacre, but determined that Sharon bore "personal responsibility". It ruled that he was negligent in ignoring the possibility of bloodshed in the camps following the assassination of the Lebanese Forces' leader, president-elect Bashir Gemayel, on September 14 - a massacre that Sharon publicly, and erroneously, blamed on Palestinians. Sharon resigned his defence portfolio, but stayed in the cabinet.
In Brussels today an appeals court will meet in closed session to decide whether to put Israel's prime minister on trial. Sharon's lawyers will argue that he has immunity as a head of government; that he is a victim of double jeopardy after the Kahan inquiry; and that the Belgian law cannot be used retroactively - claims that Mallat and his colleagues dismiss. Only if the appeals court rules for the plaintiffs will the documents be introduced to a court, obliging Sharon's lawyers either to acknowledge them or to produce others that refute them. Only then will a court hear of Sharon's early insistence that the Lebanese Forces "clean" the camps, despite their known proclivity for murder and rape.
Thus, even as the first PLO fighters left Beirut on August 21, Sharon met Bashir and Pierre Gemayel to demand a new strike against the Palestinian presence in Lebanon. Minutes of the meeting quote Sharon as saying: "A question was raised before, what would happen to the Palestinian camps once the terrorists withdraw... You've got to act... So that there be no terrorists you've got to clean the camps." Pierre Gemayel prevaricated: "We are in the midst of a political process of presidential elections... Bashir is the nominee... It is very important that calm is kept." Sharon insisted: "What would you do about the camps?" Bashir: "We are planning a real zoo."
In his testimony to Kahan, Sharon claimed that no one imagined the Lebanese Forces would carry out a massacre in the camps. This claim is contradicted by numerous testimonies in the documents in Belgium - among them Sharon's own complaint to Bashir Gemayel, minuted 10 weeks before the massacre, that "it is incumbent that we prevent several ugly things which have occurred - murders, rapes and stealing by some of your men". In the same month, in a meeting with American diplomats at the home of Johnny Abdo, Lebanon's military intelligence chief, Sharon proposed that the PLO fighters in Beirut be given "refuge" in Israel. "Although we are at a friend's house," he said, according to the report of the meeting, "rest assured that they would be more secure in our hands!"
Verhaeghe's documents show that this belief was shared by top intelligence officials identified in a secret part of the Kahan report - Appendix B. Kahan said Appendix B would not be published for reasons of national security. The lawyers believe the documents referring to these officers must come from Appendix B, but do not know whether the entire file is from Appendix B.
Echoing Sharon's concerns, according to excerpts from testimony to Kahan on October 22, Mossad chief Yitzhak Hoffi says the Phalangists "talk about solving the Palestinian problem with a hand gesture whose meaning is physical elimination... I don't think anybody had any doubts about this... They raised the issue of Lebanon being unable to survive as long as this size of population existed there." Similarly, Col Harnof, in a summary of his testimony a month later: "It was possible to surmise from contacts with the Phalange leaders what were their intentions towards the Palestinians: 'Sabra would become a zoo and Shatila Beirut's parking place' ... When they participated in actions east of Bahamdoun [when they operated against the Druze] they ran straight to the villages and committed massacres."
But the clearest indication of how the Lebanese Forces might solve the "demographic problem" was given by Bashir Gemayel himself in a meeting with Menachem Navot. In one account of this meeting, Bashir "adds that it is possible that in this context they will need several Dir Yassins" - a reference to the Palestinian village where 254 villagers were massacred in April 1948, in the most spectacular single attack in the conquest of Palestine.
In June this year, the first case involving the exercise of universal jurisdiction in Belgium resulted in the conviction of four Rwandans for war crimes committed in 1994. Mallat and his colleagues say they are determined to press for a similar result despite the accusations being levelled against them - among them anti-semitism, animosity and hatred. They say their starting point is not the criminal but the crime.
"I have a very profound belief that it is difficult to have peace in the Middle East without minimal accountability, certainly for the largest crimes," says Mallat. "We need a day of reckoning for the outstanding crime against humanity committed in Sabra and Shatila."
Gush Katif is the name given to a massive, consolidated area of settlements that is home to 7,500 Jewish settlers
It is a regular target of attack.
On Wednesday, two Palestinian suicide bombers attacked cars approaching the Neveh Dekalim settlement in Gush Katif. They blew themselves up and slightly injured the passengers.
For Gaza's Palestinians Gush Katif is the most ostentatious expression of the Israeli occupation.
The settlers say that their security is declining dramatically by the day.
"There is complete chaos here. The latest attack here was the first time that a suicide bomber got inside a settlement in Gaza," Rifka Goldschmidt, a settler who has lived in Gaza for 20 years, said.
"Gush Katif is not safe anymore. Before we had the mortar bombings, which either fell in your back yard or they didn't. But having people penetrate into Gush Katif and blast themselves against cars, this is new."
Restricted movements
After Wednesday's Palestinian attacks on settlers in the West Bank, in which 10 died, and in Gaza, security here has been massively heightened.
Gaza has been cut into three sections, completely halting Palestinian movement up and down the strip.
The attacks sent shockwaves through the community The roads into Gaza from Israel and those linking the settlements carry a trickle of Israeli only traffic.
Residents here are adamant that they have a right to be in Gaza or in the West Bank and make a distinction between Palestinian attacks inside Israel and attacks on Israeli settlers or soldiers in the occupied territories.
The people I spoke to said that Israel should respond to the events of the last days and weeks with a massive military retaliation against Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.
Rifka Goldschmidt: "Gush Katif is not safe anymore" "They wanted to kill us, they wanted to wound us, and this is the answer of Mr Arafat to the situation in the Gaza Strip. We ask for the army of Israel to clear the roads so that our people can move safely and quietly," Gush Katif's Mayor Avner Shimoni said.
Israel's retaliatory air strikes are insufficient, the mayor said.
"The army have to go into the Palestinian areas on foot, not just bombing from the air. They can go to areas near by, like Khan Younis, and clear it of terrorists. You have to know that we are now at war."
Some are leaving
The regular Palestinian attacks are however taking their toll in a small way.
Although the settlers in Gaza are some of the most committed in the occupied territories, small numbers are leaving.
"People in Neveh Dekalim are being bombarded every night, less so elsewhere. On the whole, people live in Gush Katif in fear. This has an accumulating impact on people," Rifka Goldschmidt said.
source:bbc today
What does that tell you?
Tells me that it's a shame that "Palestinians" decided to launch a terrorist series and totally forgot to arrange doctors and ambulances to deal with the response.
You don't suppose that was deliberate do you?
A Belgian court will today decide whether to try Ariel Sharon for war crimes. Julie Flint uncovers secret documents that detail Israel's involvement in the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila Julie Flint-Guardian
Yawn. The Lefty Guardian goes after Sharon. Yawn.
Arafat is also in dutch at that Belgian court you know, AND in a Rhode Island court.
For war crimes. Heh. But Sharon has already won one case - against Time Mag. They called him a war criminal - he sued - and won.
11 May 2001
The Palestine Red Crescent (PRCS) and Israel's Magen David Adom (MDA) were awarded the Human Rights prize from the Lisl and Leo Eitinger Fund by the University of Oslo for their outstanding humanitarian work in the Middle East under extremely difficult political and operational conditions. The two National Societies, working within the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, have been providing emergency medical aid to thousands of people wounded in several months of violent clashes in the region.
The Committee's grounds for giving this award, announced on May 8th, were that these two organisations were "..... working side by side for the cause of humanity across the dividing lines in a brutal conflict with deep roots. Both the MDA and the PRCS have suffered many attacks on their vehicles, but in spite of this they are continuing their humanitarian effort."
Last October, the Palestine Red Crescent which had arrived first on the scene, provided first aid to ten Israeli soldiers and their Palestinian driver injured in a road traffic accident. They worked side by side with the Magen David Adom to help the injured. The MDA has, for its part, supported the Palestine Red Crescent with medical supplies and ensured safe passage for humanitarian aid to the Palestinian areas. The two organisations formalised this co-operation in an agreement on 21 December 2000 and have established regular contact at the highest level in order to assist each other in difficult situations.
The University of Oslo's Human Rights Award, The Lisl and Leo Eitinger Prize, awarded annually since 1986, is given to a person who has been committed to human rights issues or has performed outstanding research in psychiatry. This is the first year it has not been given to an individual.
Professor Leo Eitinger (1912-1997) was born in Lomnice, now in the Slovak Republic. In 1939 he came to Norway as a refugee. He worked as a resident in psychiatry in Norway but was arrested in 1942 and deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz and later, Buchenwald. After returning to Norway after the war, he specialised in psychiatry. In 1966 he was appointed Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Oslo and became Head of the University Psychiatric Clinic.
Geezzzz. From your recent postings, I coulda sworn it was your favourite website. Yours?
WEYMOUTH: What happened during your meeting with President Bush last week?
SHARON: I must praise the president. I had a very good meeting and an important one with him. I expressed my admiration for his leadership in conducting the war against world terror. I was impressed by his detailed knowledge of what is happening in Afghanistan... I felt the deep friendship between the president and Israel, and it was very touching.
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