Posted on 04/24/2002 2:20:10 PM PDT by knighthawk
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (what a joke), April 24 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The spokesman for a group of 19 Euro MPs visiting the West Bank said Tuesday, April 23, that the Israeli occupation army's assault on the Jenin refugee camp "shows all the signs of a war crime," news agencies reported.
Francis Wurtz (Group of the European United Left), who heads a delegation from nine parliamentary blocs representing 10 European Union (E.U.) countries, said the situation was "totally intolerable," Agence France-Presse (AFP) recorded.
He said the group had come to the West Bank to show that a "majority of the European Parliament and of European public opinion harshly criticize the policy of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon."
He said: "I believe that Sharon is a great misfortune for the Palestinian people and the Israeli people. He promised peace and security and he has led to war and insecurity."
Another member of the group, Swedish MEP Per Gahrton described the camp, devastated during a nine-day battle earlier this month, as "ground zero; there is nothing left."
The delegation condemned the "systematic destruction" of the infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian territories, "the humanitarian tragedy" and the gravity of the situation in the region, calling for an peacekeeping force to be deployed there.
They also denounced as "illegal" the arrest last week of Marwan Barghouti, the West Bank chief of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's resistance Fatah movement and a leader of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
Meanwhile, a Greek C-130 plane with 12 rescue workers on board was due to leave Athens for the occupied territories early Wednesday on an aid mission to Jenin and Nablus in the West Bank, the civil protection services said, AFP reported.
"We are expecting to get Israeli authorization, and it is planned that the rescue workers leave on Wednesday morning," an official at the service said.
Earlier this month, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for suspension of the E.U.'s association agreement with Israel and calling for a United Nations-sponsored peacekeeping force.
The delegation met Tuesday with a group of Israeli pacifists and with Ahmed Qorei, speaker of the Palestinian parliament.
They said Qorei expressed serious concern about the fate of Arafat, quoting him as saying that "if the Israelis touch our president, there will be an earthquake." He also called on the group to help the Palestinians end the Israeli occupation.
In Jenin, a British rescue team Tuesday left the devastated refugee camp without finding any survivors in the rubble abandoning hope that any might still be buried alive.
"We have searched the site, and we are 99 percent sure that there are no more survivors," U.K. member John Holland told AFP.
He said the team, which arrived in the battle-scarred camp Sunday, had interviewed 120 families who may have lost relatives in the course of the ferocious nine-day Israeli military offensive.
Holland said the Palestinian families have now either accounted for, or uncovered the bodies of, all their missing loved ones.
The United Nations is due to send a fact-finding team into the camp to check out the Israeli "massacre" in Jenin in which hundreds of civilians were killed.
majority of the European Parliament and of European public opinion harshly criticize the policy of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon
Of course, the majority of the European Parliament and of European public opinion deon't mind Arafat killing of citizens or the jihad in Europe against the Jews.
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
How awful for Israel. What will replace the E. U? A plague of boils, perhaps.
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