The ceasefire is nearer than ever to collapse. Israel has killed five Palestinians in West Bank operations, since the day after the ceasefire came into effect.
The first, a dawn raid carried out in the early hours of Monday Nov. 27, killed one militant and a woman trying to run away with his gun. Palestinian militants responded with the first rocket attacks since the two early breaches of the ceasefire.
In recent West Bank operations, 15 Palestinians were detained by IDF forces in the early hours of Dec. 4. Later the Bethlehem chief of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Mohamed Fanoun, who has been wanted by Israel for several years, was detained on suspicion of terrorist activities, according to the Israeli army and Palestinian security officials.
The West Bank raids have so far been met with between five and 20 Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza, depending on which report you read. Palestinian groups claimed there was Israeli artillery fire into the strip on Dec. 3, but the reports are unconfirmed.
Monday Dec. 4 brought an announcement from Israel's Defense minister Ephraim Sneh on army radio. He said that: "Instructions have been issued to avoid unnecessary frictions and to abstain from actions that could serve as a pretext" for Palestinian militants to break the tentative ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
Army radio also reported that arrest raids would now have to be ordered by senior army command instead of by brigade commanders as was previously the case. The moves came from a meeting of the Israeli parliament's powerful Foreign Affairs and Defence committee. Olmert also told the committee on Monday that the Gaza truce was necessary because "the military operation that took place in recent months in the Gaza Strip did not stop the [rocket] fire.
" The government had previously resisted pressure, including from Condoleezza Rice and the U.S. to end its West Bank operations.
The actions, which the Israeli leadership said were necessary to thwart suicide attacks, undermined the restraint Israel has shown in Gaza and the ceasefire as a whole However the announcement did not bring renewed hope for a lasting peace. The IDF is reluctant to see the ceasefire continue from command level down. According to IDF field commanders in Gaza oppose the Security Cabinet's guidelines, which prohibit any extensive operations in Gaza and allow air strikes on terror activity only on the joint authority of the prime minister and the defense minister, as opposed to the chief of staff only, as was previously the case.
The IDF fears the militants are using the ceasefire to re-arm. Just how instrumental the IDF can be in the ceasefire's life or death and just how little difference the new instructions made was evident in the news coming from the West Bank as I wrote this article just hours after the announcement was made. In just one hour between 5.
00 and 6.00 p.m.
U.K. time Dec.
4, a Qassam rocket launched at Israel fell short of the target, landing in PA controlled Gaza. And there were reports of two Palestinians killed, two wounded and one detained in various operations in the West Bank, no IDF casualties were reported. According to IDF forces operating in PA controlled Kalkiye wounded an armed gunman and took another terrorist into custody.
The on IDF forces surrounding a militant's home and in Tulkarm demanding his surrender. The militant Assan Yaish, who was affiliated with the Fatah party and wanted for planning an attack on Israel was shot and wounded as he attempted to escape. The unidentified man with him was killed.
In another Tulkarm operation that IDF forces killed a Fatah activist in a cafe in Tulkarm, also killing a Palestinian boy. Haaretz's used recent history to show how actions like these assassinations and raids can end ceasefires and destroy peace initiatives. As they have every other cease-fire since the Al Aqsa Intifada began in Sep.
2000. The IDF actions, contrary to the government's instructions, are evidence of the in the Israeli government over the Gaza ceasefire, and the for the ceasefire from senior IDF officers and government officials. Supported by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and others, Prime Minister Olmert is doing everything in his power to keep the ceasefire alive, to try and reduce his political career from the pits of public opinion.
On the other hand Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Public Security Minister Avi Dichter take the IDF line, that the terrorists are using the ceasefire to re-arm, and, supporting the West bank raids would quite happily lay the ceasefire to rest.
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