04/12/2000 17:18 - (SA) Palestinian farm land blown up

Gaza City - The Israeli army opened a new road for Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip on Monday, ploughing over Palestinian agricultural land in violation of peace accords.

Israeli military radio said the army opened the road to take Jewish settlers from the Karni crossing point between Israel and the Gaza Strip to the Netzarim settlement.

The road runs over Palestinian-run areas and was built without the permission of Yasser Arafat's self-rule Palestinian Authority.

"What Israel did is a re-occupation and we consider this action a breach of the agreements," Saeb al-Ajez, chief of the Palestinian National Security Service in the Gaza City area, told AFP.

Witnesses said the army flattened and paved the roughly 4km bypass road, bulldozing Arab houses, fruit trees and farm land in its path.

"It is not just the road, but Israel destroyed along the road houses and razed agricultural land to protect 200 settlers who live in Netzarim. They live at the expense of a half a million residents of Gaza City and its environs," al-Ajez said. "They also destroyed water wells and factories and infrastructure."

The some 7 000 settlers living among more than a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have often come under attack while travelling near Arab areas, in particular during the past two months of deadly violence.

The Karni crossing point and the road leading to it have been particularly hot flashpoints, with near daily clashes between soldiers and Gaza Strip residents.

Witnesses said the Israeli army began work on the road more than two weeks ago and that they had uprooted some 200 olive trees belonging to Palestinian farmers and razed agricultural land without providing any compensation.

Israel's Haaretz newspaper quoted military sources as saying the road was "a response to an urgent security need.

"The new road is one of several unilateral moves by the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) in its attempts to provide greater security for the settlers," Haaretz said.

The presence of Jewish settlements is one of the greatest bones of contention for the Palestinians who consider them illegal under international law.

Israel was also due to re-open the Rafah crossing point which it jointly administers with the Palestinian Authority to allow travel from the Gaza Strip to Egypt, the reverse route having been opened last week.

But Israel and the Palestinians could not agree on terms after Israel, which has ultimate sovereignty over the terminal, imposed new security requirements for Palestinians and moved military hardware into the area.

The Palestinians have refused to co-operate as long as the new security requirements are in place, which they consider have made the crossing point into a new Israeli military base.

The Israeli army closed the Rafah terminal on 8 November after an Israeli woman customs worker was shot dead there by a Palestinian gunman.

The Israeli army did, however, open a road which Palestinians can use to travel between Gaza City in the north and Khan Yunis in the south, the two main population centres.

The route, blocked regularly by Israel over the past two months, was opened through a small bypass road and not the main artery normally used by traffic. - Sapa-AFP

http://news.24.com/News24/World/Middle_East/0,1113,2-10-35_949755,00.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 05, 2000

Answers

No wonder the Palestinians are upset.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 05, 2000.

Israeli destruction of homes fuels hatred in Gaza

By Phil Reeves in the Gaza Strip

7 December 2000

The residents of El-Kararah, a scattering of Palestinian smallholdings in the Gaza Strip, were preparing for bed when the Israeli armoured bulldozers came to flatten their homes and to drive them off the land.

For days they tried to convince themselves that the huge, sinister machines they had seen gougingorange groves up the road would never come as far as their hamlet. Surely, they thought, the Israelis would just raze the land by their military base – scene of recent attacks – but would let them collect their harvest in peace.

They were wrong. Yesterday they described how they were turned overnight from Gazan residents, who had lived on the strip for generations – surviving the 1967 war and ensuing Israeli occupation – into the latest Palestinian refugees.

The bulldozers came at night – three armoured machines crowned with machine guns and backed by Israeli tanks – and began uprooting their orange and olive orchards, transforming them into a moonscape of twisted roots, broken tree trunks and rubble.

The villagers say that, as the bulldozers crashed into their houses, they grabbed their children and whatever possessions they could carry, and fled on foot, weeping and screaming. Several of their cattle were crushed to death as the bulldozers flattened the cow sheds.

The villagers briefly tried to stay on the land by holding a sit-down protest, until Israeli soldiers began firing bullets at them. They spent the first night, shivering and bewildered, huddled in the open. Now they live in stark poverty in tents supplied by the Red Cross and the Palestinian municipal authorities, in a palm grove near their former homes.

"They have devastated our houses, and they have devastated our lives," said Samir Abdeen, a grandmother in her mid-fifties, "I can't understand why they did it. And I can't understand what they are doing on our land in the first place."

The razing happened two days after two Israeli settlers had been killed, and five children severely injured, when a Palestinian roadside bomb blew up a school bus about a mile up the road – the main north-south route in the 40-mile strip. The bomb attack, on 20 November, was close to Kfar Darom, a small Jewish settlement infiltrated only a day earlier by a Palestinian gunman, who killed two Israeli soldiers.

The Israeli army bulldozers started almost immediately, flattening acre after acre of the surrounding Palestinian orange groves. For the Israel armed forces, these were "security measures" to ensure that guerrillas could not creep up on bases or the Jewish settlements, built illegally on occupied land, which the Israeli military protects at huge cost.

It is also clearly part of a policy of clearing land around Israeli army bases, to deter crowds of rioters from attacking their soldiers with rocks and petrol bombs – acts which for the last 10 weeks have been met again and again with deadly fire from Israeli troops. Within a few days, hundreds of acres in the area – including land defined as under Palestinian autonomy by the Oslo accords – had been destroyed.

But for the Palestinians this is justcollective punishment. This part of El-Kararah – home to 14 adults and some 40 children – was a mile from the bomb, and hundreds of yards from the sensitive Israeli- controlled stretch of road used by settlers from Kfar Darom to get to nearby Gush Katif, a cluster of Jewish settlements. "We were convinced that we were safe," said Moussa el-Baouk, 19, "Nothing had ever come out of our area. But then we were attacked without warning."

Israel's strategy of punishing an entire population – with economic closures, curfews, home demolitions and by flattening olive groves – appears not to be producing the desired result, at least among the 1.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Israel's internal security forces said last week that anarchy is prevailing in Gaza, with at least nine armed groups operating outside of Yasser Arafat's control. No one expects the current lull in violence to last.

And no Palestinians will say that their appetite for the intifada has been anything but strengthened by Israeli tactics. "The Israelis are very mistaken when they use such measures," said Qassem Ali, bureau chief of Ramattan news agency, "When the Israelis hit hard, radicalism grows."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Middle_East/2000- 12/israel071200.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 06, 2000.