OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, August 25, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Israeli forces have killed five Palestinians, including three teenagers, a few hours after confirming the confiscation of Palestinian lands to link a main Jewish settlement to occupied Al-Quds (East Jerusalem).
A special unit of the Israeli army, driving a civilian car with a Palestinian plate, stormed Tulkarem refugee camp overnight, killing five Palestinians, reported Al-Jazeera news channel.
Palestinian witnesses told Reuters three of the dead were unarmed teenagers and two were resistance fighters, one from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the mainstream Fatah movement, and the other from Islamic Jihad.
The five were killed after the Israeli forces stormed the camp, surrounded a house and exchanged fire with Palestinian fighters in the area, they added.
A Palestinian security source confirmed that an Israeli special army unit had entered the refugee camp and killed five Palestinians.
The Israeli army claimed the dead were militants wanted for carrying out attacks against Israeli targets.
"All these men were armed and on the wanted list since the suicide bombing carried out on July 12 in Netanya (north of Tel Aviv) in which four Israeli civilians were killed," an Israeli spokesman told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The latest deaths brought to 4,822 the number of people killed since the start of the Intifada against Israeli occupation in September 2000, most of them Palestinian.
Counterproductive
Condemning the new Israeli violation of the shaky truce, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned it would cast its toll on the peace efforts.
He further accused Israel of trying to "renew a cycle of violence" to dodge talks based to create a Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza.
"I call on Palestinians not to respond to provocations by Israel so as not to give it a pretext to escalate its aggression ... and avoid implementation of commitments under the roadmap," Abbas said in a statement.
Palestinian resistance groups have vowed to punish Israel for the new crime against the Palestinian people, Reuters said.
"The enemy should prepare coffins because we will respond quickly and decisively in the depths of the Zionist entity," Islamic Jihad said in a statement issued in Gaza City.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri also said the Israeli raid was a "grave escalation ... Resistance factions will not stand handcuffed against this crime".
Last March, Palestinian resistance groups agreed to observe a "period of calm" conditional on Israel ending its policy of assassination targeting resistance activists.
Since then, the calm has been put to the test several times in view of continued Israeli violations.
Over the past three months, many Palestinians were killed and wounded by Israeli gunfire, drawing retaliatory mortar and rocket attacks from Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters.
Land Confiscation
In another development, an Israeli spokesman said his government has issued confiscation orders to seize Palestinian-owned lands in the West Bank to link a major Jewish settlement to occupied Al-Quds (East Jerusalem), reported Reuters.
Confiscation orders were issued last Thursday to seize four Palestinian-owned tracts of land around Maale Adumim, the largest Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, the spokesman said Wednesday, August 24.
The move means that the Palestinians would be effectively sealed off from Al-Quds, which the Palestinians consider the capital of their future independent state.
The Israeli cabinet approved on July 10, a revised route of the separation wall, leaving around a quarter of the Palestinian residents in Al-Quds cut off from the rest of the holy city.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nation's highest legal body, has ruled that the 700-kilometer (435-mile) barrier violated international law.
It said those sections of the wall constructed on occupied Palestinian territories should be torn down and Palestinians must be compensated for the damages caused.
There are around 230,000 Palestinians living in Al-Quds, home to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine in Islam.
The status of the holy city has long been one of the thorniest issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Israel captured Al-Quds in 1967 and later annexed the holy city in a move not recognized by the world community or UN resolutions.
"Dangerous"
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei lashed out at the new Israeli measure, reported Haaretz Thursday.
"The picture is very dark and very dangerous," said Qurei.
"With these actions there will be no room for a viable Palestinian state and no hope for peace."
The Palestinians have accused Israel of trying to parlay the Gaza Strip pullout into a permanent hold on the occupied West Bank, where 240,000 Jewish settlers live among 2.4 million Palestinians.
"This is consistent with Israel's tendency to expand Jewish settlements in the West bank to 'make it up' to the settlement movement for the evacuation of settlements in Gaza," said Palestinian Planning Minister Ghassan Al-Khatib.
Israel has made it clear that it intends to link Maale Adumim to other Jewish population centers about a dozen kilometers (eight miles) away in occupied Al-Quds.
It also unveiled last March that it would build 3,500 new houses in Maale Adumim, drawing immediate rebuke from the US.