Word: rafah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Palestinian death toll - and international outrage - continued to mount Thursday in response to Israel's offensive in the Rafah refugee camp along the Egypt-Gaza border. Eight Palestinians were killed Wednesday when Israeli forces fired on a crowd marching in protest toward a section of the camp where Israeli soldiers battled Palestinian fighters. Forty Palestinians have been killed since Tuesday in the course of Israel's campaign to clear the area of militants in preparation for a possible Israeli withdrawal from Gaza some time next year...
...Having embraced Sharon as a bold steward of his own "peace vision," President Bush is caught in an even deeper bind by Gaza because of the impact of Israeli actions there on perceptions of the U.S. elsewhere in the Arab world, particularly Iraq. The Rafah killings, twinned as they were in Thursday's news reports with unconfirmed claims that U.S. missiles had killed forty Iraqis at a wedding party in western Iraq, has undercut the Bush administration's best efforts to recover from the Arab-world PR disaster of Abu Ghraib. Ironically, part of the Bush administration's emergency...
Israeli intelligence officials, however, believe the attack may have been the work of Fatah chiefs in the Gaza town of Rafah, who are feuding with Arafat over his efforts to slow the traffic in weapons smuggled there through tunnels running under the Egyptian border. The attack, they say, was meant to hurt Arafat's global standing, to force him to back off. It certainly put Arafat in a tight spot. The U.S., which sent an FBI team to investigate the bombing, blamed the Palestinian leader for hindering progress against terrorism by blocking the appointment of an Interior Minister to coordinate...
...punish the occupiers of Iraq. A.l.f. officials would not comment. But any such link between Iraq and Palestinian violence would be a disturbing new development Israeli intelligence officials, however, believe the attack may have been the work of Fatah chiefs in the Gaza town of Rafah, who are feuding with Arafat over his efforts to slow the traffic in weapons smuggled there through tunnels running under the Egyptian border. The attack on the convoy, they say, was meant to hurt Arafat?s standing in the world, to force him to back off. It certainly put Arafat in a tight spot...
...anew Friday, amid growing Arab frustration over what they see as the Bush administration's failure to restrain Ariel Sharon. Twelve Palestinians have been killed in clashes in Gaza since Thursday night, as gunmen have launched new attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers there, and Israeli tanks invaded the Rafah refugee camp. Gaza had been relatively quiet over the past month as violence raged on the West Bank, but Palestinian leaders there may be inclined to take the initiative right now, which would stoke the regional political fires that first forced the Bush administration to intervene two weeks...