Palestinian resistance defies the occupiers

The Palestinian people continue to resist the more than 100-year-old Zionist colonization project that has made millions of them refugees and continues to seize and expropriate their land at gunpoint.

The week of July 3-9, according to www.arabicnews.com, Israeli forces seized approximately 250 acres from the village of Tubas located in the agriculturally rich Jordan River valley. First the Israelis denied Palestinian farmers access to the land because of “military training,” then they seized the land using a so-called “absentee law.”

Another 100 acres were seized from the village of Al-Awja located north of Jericho for use as a military outpost. In Beit Ula, a village northwest of Hebron, the Israeli authorities also confiscated five acres of grape vineyards from a farmer named Suleiman Mahmoud. Large swaths of land have also been seized for the building of the “apartheid wall.”

The armed wing of the Zionist movement is called the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The U.S. government sends the IDF billions of dollars every year in the form of the most advanced weapon systems in the world. In return it functions as an arm of the Pentagon in the oil-rich Middle East. In the past 50 years the IDF has invaded and occupied parts of Egypt, Lebanon and Syria numerous times.

Palestinians fight back

On June 25 an armed group of Pales tinians conducted a commando-type operation called “Operation Scattering Illu sion” that they had planned for six months. (Maan News Agency, July 4) It required the building of a deep tunnel almost a kilometer long from one part of Occupied Pales tine to another, as well as the constant surveillance of an IDF outpost near the Zion ist settlement of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom.

While some commandos staged a diversionary attack nearby, the rest exited the tunnel and struck at 5:30 a.m. They split into three teams. One attacked an arm ored personnel carrier. Another attacked an observation post with rocket-propelled grenades. The third team attacked a Merkava Mk 3 battle tank.

Two of the four-member tank crew were killed and another was wounded. The fourth was captured and is now a prisoner of war.

In only 10 minutes the attack was over and most of the commandos returned from where they came. Muhammad Farawneh and Hamid Rantisi were killed. Rantisi, 24, was also a swimming coach.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz descri bed the operation as “one of [Hamas’s] greatest operational victories of the last six years against the Israel Defense Forces.” (English edition, June 30)

Collective punishment

In response the Zionists have launched an attack against the civilian population and infrastructure of the Gaza region of Palestine from the ground, air and sea, destroying bridges and electricity-generating power plants. Bulldozers have devastated olive groves and other planted lands near Beit Lahya and Khan Younis. The IDF also fired air-to-ground missiles into some of the most densely populated urban communities in the world.

The IDF did all this with the Bush administration’s okay.

The Zionist attack has heightened the sense of unity in the Palestinian camp. The tensions between many organizations have evaporated. And thus far, the ground attack appears to have failed to draw out large numbers of Palestinian fighters into the open where the IDF has the advantage.