GAZA / WEST BANK: Palestine Legislative Council (PLC) holds session while a dozen are killed in Nablus and Gaza

Palestinian lawmakers held a Legislative Council session on Wednesday (July 19) at the PLC building in Gaza city and Ramallah in the west Bank. Lawmakers at the session condemned Israeli military escalation onto Gaza, Nablus in the West Bank and neighbouring Lebanon. "The problem comes from the fact that the occupier would like all the time to overcome the legality of the situation by more and more accelerating the attacks against the Palestinians and the neighbours of Palestine, this is the problem," PLC speaker Aziz Dweik told Reuters before convening the session. Israeli troops killed nine Palestinians in confrontations in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, including four gunmen and two civilians as tanks pushed into the central Gaza refugee camp of Maghazi. The Gaza raid was part of a three-week old offensive to recover a captured soldier and halt rocket fire. Heavy shooting broke out around the Maghazi refugee camp as Israeli troops crossed the border into the territory before dawn. Three militants from the governing Hamas group were killed, along with one gunman from AlAqsa Brigades, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, medics and Palestinian security sources said. The two civilians killed included a 16-year-old, medics said. About 50 Palestinians were wounded in the clashes, including four hurt by a missile fired from an Israeli drone aircraft. At least 10 of those hurt were children. In the West Bank, troops backed by armoured vehicles surrounded a Palestinian security compound, held 150 members of the Palestinian Authorities' preventive security, in the city of Nablus. The troops killed at least three gunmen from AlAqsa Brigades, the military wing of Abbas's Fatah faction, medics said. "The continuation of the Zionist aggression on our Palestinian people which is presented by an incursion to the Maghazi (refugee camp) in Gaza and Nablus and the arrest of more than 150 Palestinian soldiers. This represents a war crime and state terror as well as ethnic cleansing committed by the Zionist enemy with the aim to bring the Palestinian people to their knees and to break their will," Hamas lawmaker Mushir AlMasri told Reuters in Gaza. Israeli army spokesmen confirmed their involvement in the fighting and said five Israeli soldiers were wounded in Gaza. The army gave few details of the goal of its latest push into the Gaza. Maghazi refugee camp is a district of rundown cement block buildings in the densely populated strip of 1.4 million. Gaza has been under siege since gunmen captured an Israeli soldier in a daring cross border military raid into Israel on June 25. Around 100 Palestinians, half of them militants, have been killed in the offensive. Israeli planes have also bombarded buildings of the Palestinian government, led by Islamist group Hamas, and knocked out bridges, roads and the main power plant in Gaza. Israel holds Hamas responsible for the capture of Gilad Shalit, 19, by three militant groups, including Hamas's armed wing. Israel has rejected their demand to swap more than 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, held in Israeli jails, for Shalit the tank gunner. Palestinian witnesses said troops backed by armoured vehicles had surrounded a security compound in Nablus where militants were hiding. Medics said three were killed in ensuing clashes, members of the AlAqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement. Israeli bulldozers tore down two buildings used by the Hamas-led Palestinian government in the West Bank city of Nablus on Wednesday, medics said. The bulldozers demolished buildings used by a security service that falls under Hamas's jurisdiction, as well as the Hamas-led Interior Ministry building in the city, medics said. Israel is holding close to 150 members of the Palestinian preventive security in a building occupied by the army and turned into a base with an Israeli flag hoisted atop. The dead gunmen are also being held in the building. At the same time, Israel is fighting Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon after they abducted two soldiers in a cross-border raid last week and killed eight others in ensuing clashes. Israel has said it will continue fighting on both fronts until it gets its soldiers back and removes the threat on its borders. Both Hizbollah and Palestinian militants have continued to fire rockets into Israel, though the Lebanese guerrillas have far more powerful and longer-range rockets than the home-made missiles used by the militants in Gaza. Israel pulled troops and Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip last summer after 38 years of occupation.

ITN Source | July 19, 2006

Tags:. .escalation. .accelerating. .islamist. .siege. .occupier