Agencies  --  Arab News

GAZA CITY, 16 April 2004 — An Israeli helicopter opened fire during an army incursion into a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Gaza early yesterday, leaving 20 Palestinians wounded, medical sources and witnesses said.

The helicopter fired a rocket at a group of Palestinians gathered in the flash point Rafah refugee camp, which lies close to the border with Egypt, while bulldozers razed two houses and a third house was dynamited, the sources added.

Israel’s Army radio said the operation was aimed at destroying a tunnel used to smuggle weapons under the border from Egypt.

Rafah has been the scene of some of the deadliest violence in the course of the Palestinian intifada, with Israeli troops carrying out frequent operations to uncover the weapons tunnels.

Hundreds of houses have been demolished and thousands of Palestinians made homeless as a result of the operations, which have razed entire neighborhoods in the camps to create a buffer zone along the border.

The army staged another incursion in the northern West Bank town of Jenin in a bid to arrest wanted Palestinians. One person was injured in the operation while another was arrested, local security sources said.

Two members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, were also arrested in the nearby northern West Bank city of Nablus after an armed exchanges which left two men injured, the sources added.

Meanwhile, UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva yesterday demanded that Israel reverse its settlement activity in Palestinian territory and stop building a fence through the West Bank.

The 53-member Commission adopted a resolution brought by European countries which “demands that Israel stop and reverse the construction of the so-called security fence in the occupied Palestinian territory”.

It also urged Israel “to reverse its settlement policy in the occupied territories” and “prevent any new installation of settlers”.

Twenty-seven countries voted in favor of the resolution, and two countries — the United States and Congo — rejected it.

Twenty-four mainly Arab and Asian countries abstained in the vote. Islamic countries said they backed the demands but could not support the resolution as a whole because it also urged the Palestinian authority to “concretely demonstrate” its determination to fight against violence.

In a surprise policy shift, US President George W. Bush on Wednesday said Israel could keep some Arab land captured in the 1967 war, as he endorsed a plan by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

The plan also included a limited pullback from some West Bank settlements but not full-fledged reversal of settlement activity.

Sharon said in a letter to Bush earlier this week that Israel planned to speed up work on the barrier in the West Bank that has faced widespread international criticism, although he pledged that it would not be permanent.

Palestinians refugees in Jordan’s crowded Al-Wahdat refugee camp slammed Bush’s policy U-turn that they should not be allowed to return to land lost to Israel in 1948.

“I long for my country every day that goes by, whether Bush agrees with me or not is besides the point,” said Mohammed Bahbahani, an employee at the UN refugee agency (UNRWA) that runs the camp, east of downtown Amman and home to 50,000 people.

“He is just another tyrant. I hope the United States is crushed in Iraq,” added Bahbahani, who was born in Rafah but whose family hails from a part of what is now southern Israel.

Bahbahani, like most of Jordan’s 1.7 million registered Palestinian refugees, holds Jordanian citizenship, but insists he has “only one identity.”