Word: gaza
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...Last December, Ariel Sharon proclaimed Arafat "irrelevant." And nowhere is that more true than in the lives of the 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. They wake each day to the harsh reality of an Israeli occupation modified, but never ended, by the Oslo Accords. They endure the roadblocks that turn a 20-minute drive into a six-hour one, the checkpoints that stop women in labor from reaching hospitals, the curfews, the siege, the grinding, ever-deepening poverty, the air raids, the incursions, the demolitions of homes and fields and the incremental loss of their lands...
...Friday's suicide bombing attack in Tel Aviv, in which 24 Israelis were wounded, followed by Israeli air strikes on PA security buildings in Gaza and the West Bank, served as a vivid reminder of the recent sharp increase in violence. The three-week lull that followed Arafat's December 16 cease-fire speech has given way to an almost daily exchange of Palestinian terror attacks and Israeli assassinations of Palestinian radicals. And the Bush administration continues to hold Arafat primarily responsible...
...would lose no time in acting accordingly. The Israeli security establishment has debated whether it should try to encourage a new leadership to take charge of the PA, or else to simply seek deals with local warlords in the scores of Palestinian cantons dotted across the West Bank and Gaza. But the idea of a negotiated political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be put in the deep freeze, and few observers believe even a harsh escalation in Israeli military action will end the current low-intensity...
...side capable of stabilizing the situation. Israel's blockades, air strikes, assassinations and mini-invasions of Palestinian-controlled towns has not stopped a steady stream of gunmen and suicide bombers. There's little reason to believe that more of the same will succeed. But reoccupying the West Bank and Gaza urban centers remains exceedingly risky for the Israelis, both politically and militarily, and they're more likely to maintain the current pattern of moving troops in with heavy air- and armored support to do house-to-house searches, make arrests, and then withdrawing...
...suicide strikes, but armed action by Palestinians has done little to advance their cause politically, militarily or diplomatically. The attacks have hardened Israel's resolve, alienated the West, brought harsh repression down on ordinary Palestinians and put the goals of statehood and Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza even further beyond reach. There's a grim consensus in Palestinian society today that the al-Aqsa intifada has achieved little for their people - but that doesn't stop the militants who flip the equation by asking what will be achieved by yielding now, in the absence of any Palestinian...