Author: John Kifner
Publication: The New York Times
Date: August 7, 2002
Saying Israel is in the middle of
a war, the Supreme Court today gave the army approval to destroy without
notice the homes of 43 families related to suicide bombers, while fearful
and frustrated Israelis struggled to find a way to end a new wave of Palestinian
attacks.
Israeli helicopter gunships and
troops on the ground killed two Palestinian militants - one held responsible
for dispatching two suicide bombers to a foreign workers' district of Tel
Aviv - in a West Bank village near Jenin before dawn.
This evening, after an intense manhunt,
a heavily armed but barefoot Egyptian who infiltrated the border was caught
in southern Israel.
[Early Wednesday, more than a dozen
Israeli tanks raided Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip and moved toward
the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing a Palestinian policeman and wounding
two Palestinians before leaving several hours later, officials said, according
to Reuters.]
The police said they had averted
at least one bombing attack in Jerusalem when two sets of explosive devices,
packed with metal ball bearings, nails and screws, were found hidden near
a tunnel on a settlers' bypass highway just south of the city. And a 16-year-old
Palestinian girl was charged in court today with planning a suicide bomb
attack. The police said she confessed at a roadblock last night, although
she had no explosives.
But those developments did little
to calm Israeli nerves shattered by a half-dozen attacks on Sunday that
took 13 lives in less than 24 hours and a bomb in a Hebrew University cafeteria
last week that killed 7 and injured more than 80. The attacks followed
a period of relative calm after the army reoccupied seven Palestinian cities
and virtually shut down the West Bank, and came after an Israeli F-16 dropped
a one-ton bomb on a crowded Gaza City residential neighborhood, killing
the top Hamas military commander, Sheik Salah Shehada, along with 14 other
Palestinians, including 9 children.
Today's front pages were dominated
by disclosures that during three months of construction, only about 120
feet of the vaunted 225-mile separation fence along the West Bank were
completed.
The fence, intended to protect Israel
from Palestinian penetration, was hugely popular with voters as a means
of blocking suicide bombers.
The reaction has been furious, and
Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer promised to visit the construction
site every week to hasten the work. In recent days editorials and columnists
in the main newspapers have been sharply critical of Mr. Ben-Eliezer and
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The Haaretz columnist Yoel Marcus
summed up the gloomy mood, writing, under the headline "This Failure Has
a Father," meaning Mr. Sharon: "The security situation has changed the
way we live. People keep their distance from public places; tourists and
investors keep their distance from Israel; the economy is in the dumps;
and unemployment is sky high."
Mr. Ben-Eliezer said 140 would-be
suicide bombers were in custody, but that only made people wonder how many
more might be out there.
The defense minister met late last
night with several senior Palestinian leaders, including Abdel Razzak al-Yahyah,
the Palestinian Authority's new interior minister, and Muhammad Dahlan,
the former Gaza Strip security chief who is now listed as a security adviser
to Yasir Arafat.
But the talks appeared to make little
progress. A Palestinian delegation, including Mr. Yahyah and Saeb Erekat,
the chief negotiator, was leaving for Washington tonight to meet later
in the week with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the national security
adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
Israel's latest tactic is a revival
of one it used a dozen years ago, in the first intifada: blowing up the
homes of suicide bombers' families in the hope that the destruction will
deter further suicide attacks. Over the weekend 11 houses were blown up
or bulldozed, sometimes bringing down or damaging nearby homes.
The Supreme Court's decision threw
out a petition by 43 families asking for notice before their houses were
destroyed, so that they could appeal. The chief justice, Aharon Barak,
wrote that Israel was in a state of war and that destroying the houses
of terrorists' families was part of the overall war activity. The ruling
held that giving notice could endanger soldiers.
In the West Bank village of Jaba,
near Jenin, residents said they heard volleys of machine-gun fire and jeeps
entering the village during the night. At daybreak villagers found two
bullet-riddled bodies in the fields.
"We heard shooting," said a local
resident, Walid Alawneh, 26. `'We saw two helicopters in the sky. The helicopters
were shooting and the jeeps were shooting."
One of the dead was identified as
Ali Ajouri, 23, a local leader of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades in the Askar
refugee camp near Nablus. Israel blames him for dispatching two suicide
bombers to Tel Aviv on July 17. Because that was the Jewish fast day Tisha
b'Av, commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples, restaurants
were closed by municipal order all over the city.
Frantically phoning for instructions,
the two frustrated bombers wound up in a seedy quarter near the bus station
populated mainly by foreign workers, where after rebuffing a prostitute,
they blew themselves up almost simultaneously, killing five people, including
a Romanian worker and two Chinese.
The second body was identified as
that of Murat Marshut, 19, also a member of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades,
according to officials of Mr. Arafat's Fatah organization.
