Word: gaza
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Through Arab banks with branches in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Saddam has funded cash payments of $10,000 apiece to families of each of the nearly 600 Palestinians killed in the Aqsa intifadeh. There are daily messages of thanks placed in Palestinian newspapers by the families of "martyrs," grateful for Baghdad's money, their homes plastered throughout the mourning period with posters of Saddam. At the funerals of the intifadeh dead, there are almost as many people carrying Iraqi flags as there are bearing the green flag of Hamas...
...army in contemplating military solutions to the current uprising: The Israeli army learned, during the last intifada, that its troops are constantly vulnerable when deployed inside Palestinian urban areas. It was no coincidence that although Israel withdrew its troops from less than 40 percent of the West Bank and Gaza during the Oslo years, it was happy to include most Palestinian urban areas in the territory it handed over - better to have your troops and tanks surround the town than to be facing a potential ambush around every corner. And in Intifada II, the Palestinians have automatic rifles...
...they've forged a common front with the major Islamist groups and leftist factions. This grassroots "government of national unity" has no truck with internationally-brokered cease-fires; its objective is to wage war on the occupation. And that gives Arafat precious little room to maneuver. In July, when Gaza PA security operative Mousa Arafat had some local Hamas militants arrested, he found his home surrounded by armed men from Fatah, and Islamist and leftist groups - the standoff ended only after he agreed to release the men and undertook to cease the arrests...
...matter how much of a push-start it gets from Washington and the Europeans, it is hard to imagine the latest mooted cease-fire "rolling" as far as Hebron. And, of course, the West Bank and Gaza are dotted with Hebrons...
...Sharon was reported Tuesday to have proposed to a group of visiting Republican legislators that "it is impossible now to reach a full peace" with the Palestinians, and that meant that Israel would have to hold onto the West Bank and Gaza. The best that could be hoped for, he told them, was an "armistice" of the type Israel signed with its four Arab neighbors in 1949, to end its War of Independence. But it was considerably easier, a half century ago, for the newly independent states of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to temporarily give up on the idea...