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6 settlers die { June 21 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20638-2002Jun20.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20638-2002Jun20.html
6 Die in Shootout at Settlement
Palestinian Raid Sparks Battle; Mother, 3 Children Among Victims
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, June 21, 2002; Page A01
JERUSALEM, June 20 -- Palestinian gunmen sneaked into a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and opened fire with automatic weapons tonight, setting off a fierce and chaotic shootout with Israeli border police and settler guards in which five Israelis and one Palestinian were killed, the Israeli army reported.
The assault marked the third consecutive day of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians as the Bush administration seeks the appropriate moment to announce a widely expected U.S. peace initiative. Suicide bombings Tuesday and Wednesday hit targets in Jerusalem, while tonight's raid was aimed at one of the much-contested Jewish settlements that dot the occupied territory where Palestinians strive to establish a state.
At least two gunmen made their way under the cover of darkness into Itamar, a settlement 35 miles north of Jerusalem near the Palestinian city of Nablus, and opened their attack by firing in a street, military officials recounted. The gunmen then darted into a nearby settler family's house, spraying bullets on the way, the officials said.
Civilian settlement guards swiftly surrounded the house and fired at the intruders before Israeli Border Police troops arrived at the scene, stormed the house and killed at least one of the gunmen, Israeli television and radio reported. In the intense gun battle, at least five Israeli civilians -- a mother and three of her children, and a civilian security guard -- were killed along with one of the gunmen, said initial and still unclear reports from the Israeli military. Four people were wounded, including two border policemen.
Some of the reports indicated that a second armed intruder had been killed, and others said that one of the intruders escaped through a window. Reports from army officials and Israeli radio and television portrayed a chaotic and violent scene being played out in the darkness, making the exact sequence of events difficult to ascertain.
"We heard screaming," Yaakov Heiman, a resident, told Israel Radio. "We closed the house and then the army started to come. It's a horrible feeling."
By the end of the gun battle, the house was consumed by flames, making it difficult for rescue workers to retrieve the bodies of some of the victims, medics told Israel Radio. Several of the wounded were evacuated earlier, in the midst of the shootout, army officials said.
The assault was the second on Itamar in four weeks. On May 28, a Palestinian intruder shot dead three Israeli students at an Orthodox Jewish high school in the settlement, which is not surrounded by the barriers or fences used by many Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a militant nationalist group allied with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in his Palestine Liberation Organization, asserted responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to the Associated Press. The caller said the shooting was retaliation for Israel's arrest on June 11 of its deputy secretary general, Abdul Rahim Mallouh.
The Reuters news service received an anonymous phone call claiming that an armed offshoot of the PFLP, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, conducted the attack. Israeli forces killed Abu Ali Mustafa, head of the PFLP, last August.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon hurriedly departed a public event when he was told about the attack tonight and ordered a meeting of his top advisers at his Tel Aviv office.
"We are in the middle of a war, a hard war, a cruel war, a war that the Palestinian terrorists are carrying out against women and children and old people," Sharon said at a meeting of Jewish leaders, the Associated Press reported. "We are facing a coalition of terror led by the Palestinian Authority and backed by an axis of evil -- Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and [Osama] bin Laden."
Residents of Nablus, seven miles to the northwest, said in telephone conversations that they were bracing for an assault by Israeli forces. Even before the Itamar attack, they said, dozens of tanks and armored vehicles were trucked to the eastern edge of Nablus.
The preparations for military operations in Nablus fit into Sharon's response to the two suicide bombings in Jerusalem, which killed 26 Israelis and injured more than 100. Over the last two days, Israeli forces have dispatched troops and armor to six West Bank cities stretching from Bethlehem northward to Jenin. Sharon's office issued a statement earlier this week announcing a policy of seizing Palestinian land in response to attacks against Israeli citizens.
Under international pressure to stop the bombings against Israeli civilians, Arafat today issued oral and written statements warning that the attacks "must be completely halted," or Palestinians could risk "full Israeli occupation of our lands."
"I personally, and the Palestinian Authority, are completely against it [such attacks]," Arafat said.
But representatives of Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, which have carried out many of the suicide bombings, said they considered their attacks to be self-defense against Israeli occupation, Reuters reported.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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