VARIOUS: ISRAEL HANDS OVER BODIES OF 15 PALESTINIAN GUNMEN, WEST BANK SHOOTING RATTLES MIDEAST TRUCE.
Record ID:
377122
VARIOUS: ISRAEL HANDS OVER BODIES OF 15 PALESTINIAN GUNMEN, WEST BANK SHOOTING RATTLES MIDEAST TRUCE.
- Title: VARIOUS: ISRAEL HANDS OVER BODIES OF 15 PALESTINIAN GUNMEN, WEST BANK SHOOTING RATTLES MIDEAST TRUCE.
- Date: 14th February 2005
- Summary: (BN09) HEBRON, WEST BANK (FEBRUARY 14, 2005) (REUTERS) 1. GV/PAN: SCENE WHERE SHOOTING TOOK PLACE 0.06 2. GV/CU/MV: INJURED PALESTINIAN, WHO LATER DIED, AT SCENE; KNIFE ON GROUND; ISRAELI SOLDIERS ATTENDING TO PALESTINIAN MAN (3 SHOTS) 0.27 (BN10) HEBRON, WEST BANK (FEBRUARY 14, 2005) (REUTERS) 3. LV: CROWD OF PALESTINIANS LOOKING
- Embargoed: 1st March 2005 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: HEBRON, WEST BANK / TEL AVIV, ISRAEL / EREZ CHECKPOINT, GAZA
- City:
- Country: Palestinian Territories
- Reuters ID: LVA11N43R88L69HWRWMSBET32NX6
- Story Text: Shooting death rattles Mideast truce and Israel
hands over the bodies of 15 gunmen to Palestinians in the
Gaza Strip.
Israeli troops shot dead a knife-wielding
Palestinian in the West Bank and Palestinian militants
fired a mortar round in Gaza on Monday (February 14),
rattling a de facto ceasefire crucial to hopes of
peacemaking.
Although the incidents appeared unrelated, they
underlined persistent hair-trigger tension on the ground
that leaders of both sides want to defuse with goodwill
gestures after mutual ceasefire declarations at a February
8 summit.
Palestinian militants have agreed only to a tacit truce
but, after flouting the summit accord with a mortar barrage
last week, promised no further attacks without consulting
President Mahmoud Abbas.
Monday's killing in the West Bank city of Hebron will
be the first test of that pledge.
The Israeli army said a Palestinian with a knife
approached soldiers on patrol near Hebron's Tomb of the
Patriarchs, a shrine holy to both Jews and Muslims.
"He tried to stab a soldier and he was shot in
self-defence. The attacker is dead," a military spokesman
said.
Israeli medics tended to the Palestinian as he lay on
the ground with a bullet wound to his chest. Two knives lay
next to him. Israel Radio said he carried no
identification, and there was no immediate claim of
responsibility.
One Palestinian said the man killed was not armed with
a knife. "First he (Israeli soldier) shot him in his legs
and here in his stomach, the man, Israeli officer who came
from over (nearby jewish settlement), claimed that he had a
knife with him. The boy did not have anything with him,
they had accused him since the officer showed up, he was
walking like us and the bulldozer door opened and they
started shooting him," she said.
A Palestinian man at the scene of the shooting said,
"What I saw was that they were fighting using their hands,
him and the soldiers, he (the Palestinian youth) lifted his
hand to punch the soldier and he (the soldier) shot him.
Once he was on the ground five soldiers surrounded him and
the guy who had shot him earlier shot again, they shot four
more bullets."
In Gaza, a mortar bomb launched by militants struck a
military post, causing no injuries, the army said.
The attack broke the calm prevailing since Thursday
when militants rained mortar fire on Jewish settlements,
causing damage but no casualties, in reprisal for the
killing of a Palestinian the day before by soldiers
guarding a settlement.
A furious Abbas responded by sacking nine security
force commanders, whom he had charged with ensuring quiet
in Gaza after his January 9 election, and wringing a pledge
from militants to check with him before any further attacks
on Israelis.
Despite Monday's violence, Israel carried out a promised
gesture likely to bolster Abbas's standing among militants
by handing over the remains of 15 gunmen killed in fighting
in 2004.
Hundreds of people including relatives of the dead and
militant activists mobbed 15 flower-bedecked Palestinian
ambulances to which the bodies were transferred at a Gaza
border crossing for transport to a public memorial service
in Gaza City.
Palestinian Minister of Health Jawad el Tibi was at the
Erez crossing to receive the bodies.
"We are receiving the corpses of 15 killed martyrs,
Palestinians, today, and still there are many in Israel
buried in numbered cemeteries, we don't know when or what
is the number we are waiting for in the next negotiations,"
el Tibi explained.
Critical to Abbas's chances of gaining decisive
leverage over powerful militant groups will be prisoner
releases and military pullbacks by Israel now in the
pipeline after his groundbreaking summit with Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon.
Senior Israeli and Palestinian officials were to meet
on Monday night for security coordination talks expected to
focus on army pullbacks from five West Bank cities.
Palestinian national security force chief Haj Ismail
said the pullback was expected to begin with Jericho on
Tuesday (February 15).
Israel's cabinet on Sunday (February 13) approved the
release of 500 prisoners and officials said they could go
free as early as Wednesday (February 16). Another 400
prisoners are slated for release. Abbas has demanded many
more of the 8,000 prisoners be freed.
Abbas told The New York Times in an interview a "new
era" had dawned after four years of bloodshed and Sharon
was speaking "a new language" with his gestures and plan to
evacuate Gaza and a bit of the West Bank this summer.
The planned pullout was "a good sign to start with" on
the road to peace "and now he (Sharon) has a partner", said
Abbas, elected to succeed the late Yasser Arafat and revive
a U.S.-devised road map to a Palestinian state alongside
Israel.
The two sides remain poles apart over the desired
outcome, with Israel ruling out Palestinian demands for
total withdrawal
from the West Bank, handover of East Jerusalem for their
capital and a state with full sovereignty sooner rather
than much later.
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