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Israeli tactics hit a new low as 20 children are injured in schoolyard bombing national |
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news report
 Thursday April 10, 2003 10:21 by kokomero
 A shadowy Jewish group called Revenge of the Infants claimed responsibility for an attack on asecondary school in the village of Jaba'a, south of Jenin, which injured 20 school children yesterday. Israeli police would not be drawn on whether the claim is credible in spite of the fact that lastyear, a bomb planted by the group in an east Jerusalem school playground injured eight children, and went so far as to suggest that the students themselves might have brought the bomb. The Israeli human rights group, B'tselem, has accused the Israeli authorities of "tacit consent" in these attacks by elements believed to operate among Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The police and army deny the charges. Playground bombing injures 20 Palestinians Conal Urquhart in Jerusalem A bomb, which may have been planted by Jewish extremists, exploded in a West Bank school playground yesterday, injuring 20 Palestinian children. Lutfi Abu Oun, mayor of Jaba'a, said two of the teenagers were seriously injured. All the wounded were taken to hospitals in Jenin and Nablus. Ismail Salah, the school's headmaster, said the explosion tore through a classroom for 16-year-old boys as they returned from a midday recess. Witnesses said desks and chairs were hurled about by the blast. Pools of blood and glass shards littered the floor. Israeli police said they could not confirm the authenticity of the claim by the group, and added that the bomb could have been brought to the school by one of the students, although they had yet to investigate the scene. An Israeli police spokesman, Gil Kleiman, said: "We have no hard evidence whether this was a true announcement. We have opened an inquiry and a decision has to be made whether we can send a bomb squad to investigate." Last year, a bomb planted by the group in an east Jerusalem school playground injured eight children. Jewish militants were active in the West Bank until the early 1980s when the government clamped down on their activities. Since the start of the current intifada in 2000, acts of Jewish terrorism have been rare. In 2001, three members of a Palestinian family, including a two-month-old boy, were killed when Jewish militants sprayed a van with bullets in the West Bank. Witnesses said the killers escaped through an Israeli army checkpoint. The Israeli human rights group, B'tselem, has accused the Israeli authorities of "tacit consent" in these attacks by elements believed to operate among Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The police and army deny the charges. Elsewhere in the West Bank yesterday, the Palestinian prime minister-designate, Mahmoud Abbas, delayed naming his cabinet for two weeks, further postponing the publication of the "road map", an agenda for peace sponsored by the US, Russia, the UN and the EU. The plan sees an independent Palestinian state coexisting with Israel by 2005. Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority has objected to the changes Mr Abbas, better known as Abu Mazen, wants to make. The main disagreement appears to be over the appointment of a new interior minister. Mr Abbas would like to appoint Mohammed Dahlan, who is also backed by international mediators, while Mr Arafat would like him to retain Hani al Hassan, an Arafat loyalist. The Israeli government yesterday defended its assassination of Said Arbid, a senior Hamas activist in Gaza City on Tuesday. Two of Arbid's associates and four onlookers were killed when an F-16 fighter jet fired a missile at his car and a helicopter fired a missile at the onlookers gathered near the wreckage. Israel's deputy defence minister, Ze'ev Boim, described the killing as the "the liquidation of a head of the snake". Hamas retaliated by firing three rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot, and mortars at several Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces later raided Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza to prevent the firing of further rockets at Sderot. Witnesses said the Israeli tanks and personnel carriers were attacked with stones when they entered the town. The tank crews fired back and were believed to have killed three people, one of them aged 16.
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Jump To Comment: 1 2"Since the start of the current intifada in 2000, acts of Jewish terrorism have been rare."
War is Peace.
Ignorance is Strength.
Freedom is Slavery.
Begin to see a pattern here?
http://www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/020517/fears.shtml
Fears of Jewish underground rise
GIL SEDAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Almost 20 years after Israel was shaken by the exposure of a Jewish underground in the West Bank, some fear that another one could be emerging.
In the past few days, police detained four Jews from settlements in the Hebron Hills region. They were suspected of conspiring to plant a booby-trapped cart in a Palestinian girls school in Jerusalem.
On May 13, police arrested a fifth suspect, Noam Federman, in connection with the alleged plot. Federman is a widely known anti-Arab activist.
If the incident does prove to be part of a larger movement, it could complicate a tentative opening toward peace-making and undercut public support for the embattled settlement movement.
The first Jewish underground was exposed as a result of thorough intelligence work by the General Security Service inside the "hard core" of the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank.
In contrast, the latest alleged plot was detected by chance, when police came upon a vehicle they thought was acting strangely. Security forces reportedly had no prior knowledge of any Jewish terrorist plot.
Several days ago, a regular police patrol spotted a van, of a type frequently used by the settlers as security vehicles, stopping near the Palestinian Al-Mukassid Hospital.
The passengers tried to detach from the car a cart laden with explosives. It reportedly was set to explode at 7:35 a.m., when the street would be humming with girls on their way to a nearby school.
Police detained Shlomo Dvir (Seliger), 27, of the Bat Ayin Bet settlement in the Hebron Hills; Yarden Morag, 25, of Bat Ayin; Ofer Gamliel, 42, also of Bat Ayin; and Yosef Ben-Baruch, 23, of the Maon Farm, also near Hebron.
The four are suspected of plotting to carry out a terrorist attack. The suspects denied the charges and said they were framed and tortured by their investigators.
A Jerusalem court extended their remand.
It was the first time since the intifada began in September 2000 that security forces have laid their hands on Jews suspected of plotting terror attacks against Palestinians.
Had the incident occurred in a vacuum, it might have been overlooked as a marginal event. However, there are increasing signs of renewed Jewish vigilantism in the West Bank.
Eight Palestinian school students and a school attendant were wounded last March in an explosion in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur Baher. An unknown organization calling itself "The Revenge of the Infants" claimed responsibility for the attack, apparently in revenge for a Palestinian terrorist attack in the fervently Orthodox Beit Yisrael neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Seven Palestinians have been killed in suspected terror attacks against Palestinians in the past two years, and 10 have been wounded.
None of those cases has been cracked, but police now are checking whether the four settlers from the Hebron region are associated with the previous attacks.
The settlement establishment was shocked by the arrests. Yesha, a group representing Jewish settlers, issued a statement sharply condemning the alleged plot.
Although no charges have been pressed, Yesha issued a statement saying that "such acts are faulty and negative from every possible aspect, both legally and morally."
The settlement establishment has good reason to be nervous. One of the byproducts of the intifada has been greater public identification with the settlements. Many Israelis now believe that the Palestinians are not fighting the settlements as much as they are fighting Israel itself, with the settlers taking the brunt of the attacks on the front lines.
The re-emergence of Jewish vigilantism in the territories could cause heavy damage to sympathy for the settlement cause.
When the Jewish underground was exposed in the 1980s, Yisrael Harel, then Yesha's chairman, was one of its most outspoken critics - although some underground members were among his best friends.
However, Harel told JTA this week that he doubts the four men detained in the incident at the girls school had done anything similar to the subversive activities by members of the 1980s underground.
"I do not have any inside information," said Harel, a resident of Ofra in the West Bank, "but I suspect that even if these people are guilty, they represent only themselves."
Some of the settlers in the Hebron region are "freaks," Harel said, but they usually express their peculiarity through music, relatively free use of drugs and sex and an inclination to work in nature, for example by grazing herds in traditional biblical style.
Most Hebron Hills residents have not shown any exceptional militancy against the Palestinians, Harel said.
That, of course, is a matter of political perception. Legislator Yossi Sarid, the head of the Meretz Party, said after the arrest that the incident could be another example of the weeds of terrorism growing in the settlements.
Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service, questioned recently why Israeli security forces were so effective at nabbing Palestinian terrorists but were unable to expose Jewish ones.
The answer, of course, is that thousands of Palestinians are engaged in violence, as compared with a handful of Jewish militants.
"Jewish terrorism is marginal compared to other things which have happened during the intifada," said Ehud Sprinzak, dean of the School of Government at the Interdisciplinary Academic Center in Herzliya and an expert on Jewish terrorism. "I suppose that had there been a serious Jewish underground," the security forces "would have invested more'' in dealing with it.
http://www.worldwar3report.com/24.html
3. ULTRA-HARDLINERS TO SHARON: RECAPTURE THE TERRITORIES
The escalation of violence came with renewed pressure on Sharon to actually re-occupy and annex the Palestinian territories (see WW3 REPORT #19). Wrote the Israeli daily Haaretz March 9: "This week was marked by the call to recapture the territories. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon heard it from every direction: from cabinet ministers of his party and from cabinet ministers on the far right, from his close friends and from Likud branches across the country." [top]
4. SHARON CABINET MINISTER CALLS FOR TARGETING CIVILIANS?
Israel's Minister of Infrastructure, Avigdor Lieberman, urged Prime Minister Sharon to order a systematic bombing of Palestinian population centers, the Palestine Media Center claimed. Citing "Israeli sources," the PMC said Lieberman suggested during a cabinet meeting on March 5 that the IDF bomb Palestinian "markets, mosques, banks, and malls." ( Palestine Media Center, March 6 ) The UK Independent reported the following exchange March 7. Lieberman reportedly told the meeting: "At 8 AM we'll bomb all the commercial centers... at noon we'll bomb their gas stations... at two we'll bomb their banks." Foreign Minister Shimon Peres interrupted to say: "And at 6 PM you'll receive an invitation to the international tribunal in The Hague." In Nov., after the US bombing of Afghanistan began, Lieberman decried the "double standard" by which "The Americans blow up a hospital and a Red Cross station, and nobody asks them such questions," while Israel is pressured for civilian casualties in retaliation to Palestinian terrorism. (US News & World Report, Nov. 5) [top]
5. "REVENGE OF THE INFANTS" PLOTS TO KILL CHILDREN
In southern Jerusalem's Arab neighborhood of Sur Bahir March 5, metal cones hidden in a grove of pines in a school yard exploded, spraying bullets and shrapnel all over the yard, breaking windows in the schoolhouse and sending students scrambling under their desks. The bomb was set to go off during morning exercises when the yard is usually filled with some 400 Palestinian junior high school students--the death toll would have been high if the cones hadn't been discovered ten minutes before detonation and the yard evacuated. An Israel Radio reporter received a message claiming responsibility for the attack in the name of "Revenge of the Infants," saying it was intended to avenge the killing of Jewish children by Palestinian suicide bombers. Four Israeli children were killed in the previous weekend's suicide attacks. But Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert suggested the bombing was a provocation by Palestinian militants: "Suicide, killing themselves, is not foreign to their repertoire. So one can imagine the possibility that they're doing it to themselves in an attempt to create a provocation, to stir up this population." Angry students later marched out of the schoolyard, holding signs raeidng "Stop killing our children," and hurling rocks at Israeli riot police, who responded with stun grenades and tear gas. (NYT March 6) [top]