OCCUPIED
JERUSALEM, September 25 (IslamOnline & News agencies) - West Bank
intelligence chief said he and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat will
fight till the last minute, while the Israeli army abducted 11
Palestinians across the West Bank overnight and destroyed three
Palestinian houses.
West
Bank intelligence chief Tawfiq Tirawi, besieged with Arafat and whose
surrender Israel demands, said the Palestinian leader and himself would
fight until the end, in an interview published Wednesday, September 25.
“I
have never given up in my life. I don’t know what surrender is. I have
the right and the obligation to defend myself. I intend to fight. Both
Yasser Arafat and I will fight until the last minute,” he told the
Israeli daily Ma’ariv.
“I
look at your tanks, at the snipers, at the whole army, and feel joy.
Because I know that these two rooms, in which we are huddled together
with president Arafat, are stronger than all this might,” he added.
Tirawi
has been confined, together with another 250 people, to the last
building still standing in Arafat’s Ramallah compound, since it was
invaded and razed by the Israeli army on September 19.
He
is the most senior official on a list of people whose surrender Israel
demands before lifting the siege on the veteran Palestinian leader’s
crumbling office, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
But
Tirawi rejected the Israeli accusations of being directly involved in
“terrorist activity.”
“I
challenge you: Show me this information, any proof, about carrying out
terror attacks in Israel,” he told Ma’ariv. “I am a wanted man
because I am a patriot. It is a political decision, it is not connected
to security.”
When
asked whether he thought Palestinian attacks against Israeli soldiers
and Jewish settlers were legitimate, Tirawi said: “Try seeing it from
my point of view. The army attacked us with great might. They kill us,
occupy us, carry out demolitions, shoot at us, murder us, kill our
officers and people. You invade Ramallah with tanks. So you want us to
stand around and throw flowers at you?”
In
another interview published Tuesday by a Lebanese newspaper, Tirawi said
Israel had demanded his surrender because he refuses any alternative to
Yasser Arafat.
Meanwhile,
the Israeli army abducted 11 Palestinians across the West Bank overnight
and blew up three houses belonging to Palestinians allegedly accused of
attacking Israel, military sources and witnesses said.
The
11 arrested were on a list drawn up by the Israeli intelligence
services, the army said. Six were rounded up in the city of Tulkarem.
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A
picture handed out by his office shows Arafat in his besieged
office in the West Bank city of Ramallah
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One
house blown up in Dura, in the southern West Bank, was the family home
of brothers Anais and Akram al-Namura, who were jailed after a series of
attacks with no evidence linking him to these attacks.
Some
15 people lived in the three-storey dwelling, which belonged to the
father of the brothers, Mahmud Talal al-Namura, witnesses said.
In
Al-Khalil (Hebron) city, the army also dynamited the house of Dayab
al-Shuweiki, an Islamic Jihad member wanted by the Israeli security
services.
In
the same southern city, the army demolished the house of Abdel Khalek
al-Natshe, a leader of the main Islamic resistance group Hamas who has
been in Israeli custody for a month.
Since
the beginning of August the Israeli army has destroyed more than 40
Palestinian houses, a practice that has been denounced by human rights
groups as collective punishment outlawed by the Geneva conventions.
Meanwhile
the army claimed that one of nine people killed in a massive military
incursions into the Gaza Strip on Monday night was a prominent member of
Hamas’ armed wing.
Yassin
Nasser, 53, was a ‘bomb-maker’ for the Ezzedin al-Qassam brigades,
the army said.
At
the funerals of the nine dead on Tuesday leaders of Palestinian
resistance groups vowed to step up their anti-Israel bombings in
response.
In
the northern West Bank town of Jenin, medics said two Palestinians were
injured in clashes that erupted when an Israeli armored column entered
the town, which like most West Bank urban centers has been reoccupied
and under frequent curfew since mid-June.
Meanwhile
and at the time the Palestinians are suffering under Israeli occupation,
many Israelis make the pilgrimage to Al-Khalil (Hebron) to celebrate.
The
town’s 120,000 Palestinian inhabitants, for their part, are kept
strictly out of sight, pinned behind closed doors by a strict Israeli
curfew to hand over the town to the 500 resident Jewish settlers, their
guests, and visitors.
Under
the 1997 Hebron Accord, the Palestinian Authority was given 80 percent
of city, but the remaining 20 percent remains a Jewish enclave,
permanently protected by several hundred Israeli soldiers and police.
