http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=90783
World stays silent as Israel flattens Palestinian bases
By Phil Reeves in Gaza
27 August 2001
More than 12 hours after Israeli jets roared in before dawn yesterday to
flatten security headquarters in Gaza and the West Bank to avenge the
Palestinians' first major guerrilla infiltration into an Israeli army base, not
a whisper of complaint had emerged from the international community.
Only three months of the Middle East's "summer of hate" have been needed for
Israel's use of American-made F-16 and F-15 warplanes to bomb the Palestinians
to be seen as a routine military tactic.
When Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, first used F-16s in May, killing a
dozen Palestinians in the West Bank in answer to a suicide bombing, there was
an outcry; it was the first attack by warplanes on the Palestinians of the
occupied territories since the 1967 war. Israel's army held off from using them
again for weeks afterwards. But yesterday -- the third such strike -- the world
shrugged it off.
By sunset, there had been no significant criticism, no protest that this was
another example of excessive force.
Israel was focused on the incidents that prompted the bombing raids -- an attack
before dawn on Saturday by two Palestinian guerrillas from the Democratic Front
for the Liberation of Palestine, who managed to infiltrate a heavily fortified
army base in a hillock in southern Gaza and killed three soldiers, including a
major. Israel's army commanders have been highly embarrassed by the assault,
which is the first of its kind during the 11-month intifada, and have launched
an inquiry.
Later on Saturday, two more Jewish settlers -- a married couple -- were killed in
a West Bank ambush.
The F-16's laser-guided missiles used in the strikes are designed to bring down
buildings like playing cards. Most of the main headquarters of the Palestinian
police in Gaza City, a large complex that once housed hundreds of men, was
turned into a heap of dust and broken concrete. One half of the four-storey
building came crashing down; a third of a nearby administrative building was
similarly destroyed.
The scene was the same 10 miles down the road, close to the Jewish settlement
of Kfar Darom. A base belonging to Palestinian military intelligence, but
evacuated three months ago, lay in a pile, adorned only with a tattered
Palestinian flag that continued to fly from a flagpole above a sign showing the
unit's insignia.
There is no comparison between these ruins and those buildings hit by missiles
fired from helicopters, Israel's most frequent form of aerial attack in the
occupied territories. The latter are usually intact, but punctured by a large
hole. The former look as if they have been brought tumbling down by an enormous
earthquake.
And that is the crucial point. The F-16 strikes hit buildings belonging to
Yasser Arafat's security apparatus, which the Israelis knew were likely to be
empty. The weapons accurately found their targets. A handful of people were
injured but no one was killed -- although a man died in Rafa, southern Gaza, in
a separate Israeli demolition raid on the ground.
The air raid was clinically executed, and almost ritualistic punishment,
designed to intimidate the Palestinians by providing them with another example
of Israel's massive military superiority. But this is an incredibly dangerous
game. It is all too easy to imagine an F-16 hitting not a police station, but
an apartment block crammed -- as they usually are in the grotesquely overcrowded
Gaza -- with families.
A massacre would ratchet up the conflict to a terrible new level. The United
States has played an important role in creating the conditions in which it is
now possible for Israel to deploy F-16s without incurring an international
backlash. The message that has been emanating from George Bush, the US
president, while on holiday is that he does not want to get involved in a
conflict that can only lose him votes, and that he will not complain if Israel
toughens its methods further.
Gaza was not the only place in the cross-hairs of the F-16 bombers yesterday.
The Israelis also flattened a police station in Salfit, a Palestinian town
south of the Ariel corridor -- a finger of occupied land in the northern West
Bank that has been steadily populated with settlers.
Reports have long been amassing of Jewish settlers using violence to try to
drive Arabs off the land, which is already under total Israeli military
control, and which Israel wants to annex, should it ever get a peace deal.
Yesterday, Israel peace activists were puzzling over why their air force had
hit Salfit, where the military closure was tightened yesterday.
Also yesterday Gaza was celebrating what was deemed to have been a successful
attack by its fighters on a base belonging to the occupying Israelis. Posters
of the two dead DFLP guerrillas posing with their weapons have already begun to
adorn the streets. No one seems to see any contradiction between their role as
guerrillas for a Marxist opposition group, and their membership of Mr Arafat's
security apparatus. One, Amin Abu Hatab, was a member of military intelligence;
the other, Hisham Abu Jamous, was a border policeman.
The DFLP -- hitherto inactive in the military side of the intifada -- appears
satisfied with the results despite the death of their two gunmen. The DFLP,
like the mainstream Fatah, is against attacks against civilians inside Israel.
DFLP officials see the raid on the Israel base as an example of the best form
of resistance -- a war fought against Israeli soldiers and settlers in the
occupied West Bank and Gaza. "It was meant as a message, that we can do this
and that we can do it inside Gaza, despite the high level of security," said
Saleh Zeidan, the DFLP's political spokesman. Asked if there would be more, he
smiled bleakly. "We hope so," he replied.
