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PROFILE: RECENT VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND ITS EFFECT ON HOPES FOR THE LATEST PEACE EFFORT
Weekend Edition Sunday: May 4, 2003
 Mideast Violence Continues Despite Release of Peace Plan
LIANE HANSEN, host:
Secretary of State Powell plans to return to the Middle East later this month. He'll visit Jerusalem and Ramallah for talks with Israelis and Palestinians on the road map for peace. But even as the plan was being made public last week, more blood was spilled on both sides. Israeli civilians were killed in Tel Aviv, and Palestinian civilians were killed in the Gaza Strip. NPR's Peter Kenyon has this report on the recent violence and its effect on hopes for the latest peace effort.
PETER KENYON reporting:
Hours before Mahmoud Abbas' first speech as Palestinian prime minister, in which he called for and end to violence, missiles from an Israeli helicopter killed two Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Hours after the release of the road map, Israeli blood and body parts were again spattered across a Tel Aviv sidewalk as a suicide bomber killed himself and three others at a bar along the city's seafront.
SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLES
KENYON: The Israeli army's response focused on this street in Soja Iyaa(ph) in the eastern Gaza Strip, where an earth-mover was cleaning up rubble on Friday. Mofeat Sahd(ph), who lost a cousin in the incursion, says he heard sounds from the street around 2 that morning, and came down to see Israeli military jeeps heading toward the Abu Hin family's house down the street.
Mr. MOFEAT SAHD: (Through Translator) Then there were cross-fire shootings on both sides and one hour later, tanks did arrive. Two jeeps were tailing--crashed because of the rubble and because of heavy shooting around and then the helicopters start to appear. And from that moment, the war started in the area.
KENYON: The army says the three wanted Abu Hin brothers, Yusef, Mahmud and Ayman, were members of the Hamas military wing. Family members here agree and confirm that the soldiers asked the brothers to surrender peacefully, but they were determined to fight to the death. In this second-story room, the destruction suggests the use of massive firepower. Windows and doors are blown out by tank shells. In one corner, flowers have been placed over a large pool of blood. More blood is spattered on the walls, up a large armoire. Shockingly, there's even a large splotch on the ceiling. A 25-year-old cousin named Ismael says everyone expected the brothers to fight, but no one anticipated that a huge gun battle would rage all morning and into the afternoon.
ISMAEL: Believe me, even I didn't go to the toilet. I sit at home, I mean, pissing in the basket. Believe me, I'm not being killed. Innocent people, innocent children, they were scared. Believe me, many children were, I mean, crying out of fear.
KENYON: Another major battle was taking place out on the streets, and that's where most of the civilians appear to have died. On another street blocks from the Abu Hin house, Ahmed Ayad was calling his four children to stay away from the windows because Israeli snipers were firing from one of the tallest buildings in the neighborhood. And his wife had just taken their two-year-old boy Amer into the bedroom when he heard her scream as an M-16 bullet crashed into one side of the child's skull and out the other.
Mr. AHMED AYAD: (Through Translator) The blood was everywhere. His mother screamed. I run in. I carried him. I was just carrying him, seeing the blood, seeing the hole in his head, and I was knowing this is the end.
KENYON: Ayad was an iron worker in Israel before the intifada. He wants peace so he can support his family again. But he says if this is how Israel responds to the road map for peace and the new Palestinian government, the future holds nothing but more tears and bloodshed.
SOUNDBITE OF FUNERAL PROCESSION
KENYON: At Friday's raucous funeral procession for the 12 Palestinians killed in the Soja Iyaa incursion, Hamas and Al Aqsa Brigade leaders swore never to disarm. Hamas' aging founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said the Palestinian people have no faith in their new prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas.
Sheikh AHMED YASSIN (Hamas): (Foreign language spoken)
KENYON: `This new government is the face of Israel and America,' said Yassin. `It will not succeed and the road map will also fail, just like the Mitchell plan, the Oslo Accords and other such plans.'
The new Palestinian prime minister is expected to seek a cease-fire with Hamas and the other factions rather than a forced disarmament. A senior Palestinian intelligence officer in Gaza City says if illegal weapons are displayed on the street, they will be seized, but there will be no attempt to go house to house to confiscate weapons. But even that relatively non-confrontational course angers many Gazans. Mahmoud Al-Shia(ph) says Abbas has no choice.
Mr. MAHMOUD AL-SHIA: And to know the only thing which is respectful for him to do, to resign; unless we'll understand him that he's going to implement the policy which Israel try to limit yesterday; he is going to continue it. If he doesn't want to continue it, the best thing for our support--to resign.
KENYON: These are the images that accompanied the release of the road map last week: Israeli families sobbing at the funerals of the Tel Aviv bombing victims and Ahmed Ayad carrying his dying baby boy down a Gaza street. These are the images Secretary of State Powell will be asking people to look beyond as he struggles to get another peace effort off the ground. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Gaza.
HANSEN: It's 18 minutes past the hour.
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