Israel kills three in W.Bank offensive
Reuters
Date: 09-30-05
NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) - Israeli forces killed two Palestinian gunmen and a teenager in the occupied West Bank on Friday, pressing ahead with raids against militants despite a halt to cross-border rocket salvoes from the Gaza Strip.
A week-long wave of violence has cast a shadow over Palestinian municipal elections, preliminary results of which suggested Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Advertisement
ruling Fatah faction had made a strong showing. Militant group Hamas also made inroads.
The flare-up has frayed a seven-month-old cease-fire and deflated hopes that Israel's Gaza pullout might open the way for a revival of peacemaking.
Abbas urged Palestinian factions to show restraint but said "the Israelis should know that these incidents cannot be tolerated".
"These provocations and the continuation of these acts certainly have a great and grave influence on the entire calm which we are exerting all efforts in order to maintain," Abbas told reporters outside his Gaza office on Friday.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Fatah, said two fighters died in an army raid on Balata refugee camp in Nablus. Troops later shot dead a 13-year-old stone-thrower in nearby Askar camp, witnesses said.
The Israeli army said Palestinians fired first and troops responded after swooping on the camps before dawn to arrest militants. One soldier was slightly wounded in the raids.
On Thursday, Israeli troops shot dead three gunmen in West Bank raids. Hundreds of suspected militants have been detained by Israeli forces in sweeps in the territory over the past week.
The rocket fire that led to the Israeli offensive, which has included artillery and missile attacks in the Gaza Strip, abated on Tuesday in response to pleas from the Palestinian public for calm to enable reconstruction after 38 years of occupation. But Israel has kept up the heat.
Around 4,000 children gathered on Friday near the former Jewish settlement of Netzarim in Gaza to commemorate the killing of two Palestinian boys in the area near the start of a 2000 uprising. The rally was organised by militant group Islamic Jihad.
PALESTINIAN ELECTIONS
The latest bloodshed came hours after Palestinians finished voting in a third round of local elections in the West Bank -- widely seen as a test of political clout for Hamas ahead of a parliamentary ballot in January.
Fatah won control of 65 of the 104 municipal councils up for grabs compared with 22 for Hamas and 17 for other factions, said Firas Yaghi, executive director of the Higher Commission for Local Elections. Turnout was 85 percent.
The performance of Fatah, which has been struggling to overcome public dissatisfaction with corruption and mismanagement in the Palestinian Authority, was better relative to Hamas than in two previous rounds.
Hamas said the preliminary figures did not reflect its grassroots popularity, noting that its candidates did not run in some districts for fear of arrest by Israel.
Official figures are due on Saturday. The local elections could signal Hamas's strength in the coming legislative vote. Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, boycotted the only previous parliamentary ballot in 1996.
Thursday's ballot was the first Palestinian vote since Israel completed its Gaza pullout on September 12.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has vowed Israel will keep West Bank settlement blocs much larger than its former Gaza enclaves.
Hamas, the driving force behind suicide bombings against Israelis during five years of a Palestinian uprising before it agreed to a truce in February at Abbas's behest, did well in the two earlier phases of municipal voting.
Its popularity is underpinned not only by its fight against Israel but its charity network and corruption-free image.
Sharon had said Israel would not facilitate voting in the parliamentary ballot in the West Bank, where the army has a network of roadblocks, if Hamas ran without first disarming. Palestinians demand that Israel not interfere in their politics.
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Writing by Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem)
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