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Palestinian homes are bulldozed in night raid

By Alan Philps in Khan Younis

HOURS after Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, announced that he had a "plan" to restore security, troops went into action in the Khan Younis refugee camp under cover of darkness and demolished 32 homes.

According to residents, Israeli tanks moved in just before midnight, accompanied by four armoured bulldozers. After a barrage of shells, rockets and gunfire, the bulldozers began destroying the single-storey shacks where 52 families lived. Two Palestinians - a policeman and a civilian - were killed and 25 wounded.

There was a fierce battle as dozens of Palestinians, summoned by alarm calls broadcast from the mosque minarets, tried to take on the Israeli tanks. The destruction continued until dawn, when the troops withdrew. It was the deepest raid into Palestinian territory and the largest single destruction of Palestinian homes since the violence began six months ago.

Israel Radio said it was a "new stage in the escalation of the fighting". "This is all I have left," said Sorayya Abu-Loz, a mother of eight, pointing to a dusty Singer sewing machine and some bags of sugar and flour. She sat on the meagre provisions, surrounded by her children aged four to 12, as if this was the only way to protect her last surviving possessions.

Everyone in Gaza saw the levelling of the western edge of Khan Younis, where 60,000 Palestinians have lived since 1949, as punishment for months of potshots fired from the camp at the Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim, just 100 yards away. The Israeli army said the operation, which was codenamed Enjoyable Song, was designed to hit "sources of terror and distance Israeli towns from threats".

The Defence Minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, said he wanted to blast the Palestinians back to peace talks. "We want to return to the negotiating table, and the goal of the army's operations is to show the Palestinians that they have every interest in resuming the path of negotiations," he said.

There were no takers for Mr Ben-Eliezer's argument in the rubble of Khan Younis. Peter Hansen, the commissioner-general of UNRWA, the United Nations agency which looks after Palestinian refugees, said he was on his way from the camp to deliver a protest to the Israelis. "Mr Sharon said yesterday he had a plan. I hope this is not part of it," he said. "If he wants to increase anger and hatred, this is the way. It is very difficult to imagine a peace process built on the rubble of people's homes."

Mohammed Ayesh, a television engineer, was more blunt. "Of course we want peace, but aggression can be countered only by aggression," he said. He admitted that Palestinian gunmen did fire from the taller buildings at Neve Dekalim.

Walking over the rubble identifying bits of his home - a few bathroom tiles here, the back of a television there - he added: "We are used to tank shells, but as soon as we heard the sound of the engines we knew this was something different and they were coming to kick us out."

Every Palestinian knows that it was Mr Sharon who, as the local army commander in the early 1970s, demolished homes in the Gaza Strip to widen the roads through the refugee camps and give the army greater freedom of movement.

According to the Israeli press, on Tuesday Mr Sharon cut short a wordy briefing by Major-Gen Doron Almog, head of Southern Command, with the tart comment: "When I was commander here, I focused on deeds not words." Within hours his words became deeds.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2001