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AP Tuesday, March 5, 2002
16 Palestinians Killed by Israeli Fire
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) - Israel stepped up reprisals Monday for Palestinian shootings and bombings, killing 16 Palestinians including the wife and three children of an Islamic militant leader and a doctor whose ambulance was hit during rescue efforts.
Israel's security Cabinet decided late Sunday to intensify military strikes after 22 Israelis were killed in four weekend attacks by Palestinian militants. Israeli troops raided two Palestinian refugee camps Monday, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said his country was at war.
In the deadliest single incident Monday, a pickup truck belonging to a leader of the militant group Hamas, Hussein Abu Kweik, was hit in the West Bank town of Ramallah by two shells fired from a nearby Israeli tank. A second car was hit by shrapnel.
Abu Kweik's wife had just picked up her children - ages 8, 14 and 17 - from school and was driving in a well-to-do neighborhood when the vehicle was hit and all four were killed. In the second car, two youngsters ages 4 and 16 were killed.
Abu Kweik said he would avenge his family.
``I swear to God they (the Israelis) will pay a very high price for this crime,'' he said, accompanied by hundreds of mourners after viewing the bodies at Ramallah Hospital. ``We will continue our resistance until it's the end of the last (Israeli) soldier on our lands.''
Hamas has carried out scores of suicide bombings against Israelis in recent months.
Israel's military said the tank shells were aimed at a car carrying armed Palestinians and hit the pickup truck by mistake. In a statement, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer expressed ``regret at the loss of life of Palestinian civilians'' as a result of the Israeli shelling.
In 17 months of fighting, Israel has killed dozens of suspected Palestinian militants in targeted attacks, but Brig. Gen. Ron Kitrey, the army spokesman, said Abu Kweik had not been a target. He was not in the pickup truck Monday.
In an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, six Palestinians were killed and 20 wounded, eight of them seriously, by Israeli fire, hospital officials said.
In the fighting, Israeli troops in tanks and helicopters fired machine guns toward Palestinian gunmen, some of whom had taken cover in homes. One tank shell hit a house, killing a man and wounding members of his family, hospital officials said. Ambulances could not reach many of the wounded for some time because of the heavy shooting, witnesses said.
Dr. Khalil Suleiman, the head of local emergency services, was overseeing rescue efforts from an ambulance when the vehicle came under Israeli fire that killed him and seriously wounded three of his colleagues, Red Crescent officials said. The Red Crescent said the ambulance was hit by an Israeli tank shell.
Israeli army officials said the ambulance approached an Israeli checkpoint at high speed and that soldiers opened fire, fearing the vehicle was trying to run them down. The military said the ambulance exploded, raising questions about what might have been in it.
The army has said ambulances are being used to smuggle weapons and gunmen, while Palestinians say soldiers have been firing indiscriminately at ambulances.
In the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops entered the Rafah refugee camp on the border with Egypt and demolished three buildings, witnesses said. Troops exchanged fire with local gunmen, killing two armed Palestinians and a civilian and wounding seven people, doctors said. The Israeli military said troops searched for tunnels used to smuggle arms under the border from Egypt. Also Monday, Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian man who ran toward an Israeli army checkpoint near the West Bank town of Nablus, the army said.
The latest chain of attacks and reprisals began last week when Israel raided two Palestinian refugee camps - Balata and Jenin - in an attempt to break militant strongholds, killing 23 Palestinians in the fighting.
In retaliation, the Al Aqsa Brigades, a militia linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah militia, carried out back-to-back attacks.
On Saturday, a suicide bomber blew himself up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem, killing himself and 10 Israelis, including five children. On Sunday, a sniper killed seven Israeli soldiers and three civilians at an army checkpoint in the West Bank.
Israel's security Cabinet decided in a meeting late Sunday to hit the Palestinians harder. Sharon told parliament on Monday that Israel would not succumb to what he has described as a relentless campaign of Palestinian terror.
``We are in a war over our home and the war is horrible,'' Sharon said. ``But we will win. I am sure in the end that we will win and peace will come to this home.''
Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit said neither the left nor the right in Sharon's coalition government has a solution to the current conflict.
``If there was... I imagine Sharon would adopt it and every one of us in the Cabinet would adopt it,'' Sheetrit told Israel TV. ``I regret that there is no such magic solution.''
The Palestinian Authority demanded immediate international intervention to stop ``this barbaric Israeli aggression against our people and our land.''
A leader of the Al Aqsa Brigades said attacks on Israelis would continue. Many Palestinians are clamoring to become suicide bombers, said the militiaman, who called himself Abu Mujahed. ``Al Aqsa is becoming an army now and everyone wants to join,'' he said.
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