|
|
|
|
|
TITLE: Israel 'Effectively Re-Takes' a Third of Gaza Strip |
AUTHOR: Peter King |
PUB: Agence France-Presse |
DATE: April 27, 2001 |
|
Israel's brief reoccupation of part of the Gaza Strip last week caused a global outcry, but Palestinian security chiefs and frustrated residents say the Jewish state has been expanding its control of the land for months. With Israeli weaponry imposing vast areas of no-man's-land, Palestinians have been unable to access around a third of Gaza Strip land nominally under the control of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's self-rule authority, said Colonel Saeb Al Ajiz, commander of national security forces for the northern Gaza Strip. "The occupation comes in various guises," Ajiz said. "In this case, the Israeli army is commanding the area with gunfire." He said he considers the Israeli army has reoccupied around 100 square kilometres of the narrow 360-square-kilometre strip of land wedged between the Mediterranean sea and Israel's Negev desert since the Palestinians revolted seven months ago. That has been carved out of the 85 per cent of the strip the Israeli army says is under Palestinian control, and on top of the 60 square kilometres of fortified Jewish settlements Israel already controls. "It's clear that the objective is to reoccupy the areas in such a way that the picture is not exposed to international public opinion," Ajiz said. The United States issued a sharp rebuke to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for Israel's first open reoccupation of Palestinian land since the 1994 autonomy accords during an April 16 incursion into the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. The army, which had sent its tanks in to the Beit Hanun area after mortar bombs fell on the Israeli town of Sderot, withdrew amid accusations by US Secretary of State Colin Powell that the action was "excessive and disproportionate." But Gaza landowners say the army is effectively occupying their land without having to deploy its tanks and troops in Palestinian areas. "We're being occupied," said 75-year-old Mohammad Waheidi who owns orange groves at Martyrs Crossroads, where a road to the fortified Netzarim Jewish settlement intersects with Gaza's main north-south Salaheddin highway. "It's like the frontline between France and Germany during the World War. Anyone who goes there dies," he said. "That land out there as far as Netzarim is useless. We can't work on it because the Israelis will shoot at us. The land has gone to waste and the crops are all rotting." The Israeli army said it "fully and totally" rejects the Palestinian claims that it has retaken any more of the Gaza Strip, an area just over twice the size of Washington D.C. and where Arafat has his headquarters. "There is conflict there, but we did not change the partition of land," an army spokesman said. In addition to daytime shooting incidents and frequent night raids in which Israeli tanks roll in on to Palestinian land to demolish security outposts, raze houses and bulldoze farmland, troops have also occupied Palestinian homes, setting up permanent camp on at least three rooftops around Netzarim. "I'm living a life of hell," said Mohammad Abu Dahruj, a civil servant at the Palestinian ministry of labour, who has had to share his staircase with a squad of young Israeli soldiers living on his roof since January. Abu Dahruj's home lies within a wide belt of land the army has turned into a buffer zone along the road that links Netzarim to the Karni border crossing with Israel. "How do you think my children feel when they hear the sound of their rifles shooting at night," Abu Dahruj told AFP, holding his sobbing two-year-old son Rami on his lap. Waheidi's grandchildren say they watch the lines of fire traced by bullets as they shoot between the soldiers on Abu Dahruj's roof and Palestinian gunmen across their orange groves by night. Under the Oslo peace accords, Israel has the power "to conduct independent security activity" along roads used by settlers in the Gaza Strip, but the Palestinians complain Israel has reinterpreted the accords, encroaching on land far around the roads and demolishing Palestinian security posts there. Ajiz and the head of the Palestinians' liaison committee for the southern Gaza Strip, General Khaled Abu Ulaa, said the army has also taken effective control of buffer zones along the borders with Israel. These include a 21-square-kilometre area along the northern border with Israel and a one-kilometre-deep stretch of land the length of the territory's 42-kilometre eastern border with Israel, they said. "Israel informed us around two months ago that it would impose an exclusion zone 200 metres deep into the eastern border, but in reality it reaches as far as their bullets reach, which is more than a kilometre," Abul Ulaa said. Palestinians have been obliged to coordinate their activities along the borders with Israel under autonomy accords, but residents had been free to work the land there before the uprising against the occupation erupted late September. "The people can't reach their land or the factories where they work. The Israeli army is commanding the areas with gunfire. They have been occupied and the land has been taken control of," Ajiz said. END |