Palestinian teenager shot dead by Israeli occupation tank in Tulkarem

28/10/2002| IslamWeb

A 16-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by machine-gun fire from an Israeli tank as youths stoned an occupation army column during curfew in the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem.Palestinian security officials said Ahmed Ombus, was killed Monday at the entrance to the Tulkarem refugee camp as the youths pelted stones at the tank and occupation army jeeps enforcing the curfew in the town on the boundary with Israel.

Home-made Palestinian rocket hits southern Israel

A home-made Palestinian rocket landed near the southern Israeli town of Sderot after being fired by resistance men inside the neighbouring Gaza Strip.

The Qassam missile, manufactured by the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, exploded near a school under construction, causing neither injury nor damage, the Israeli occupation army said Monday.

The resistance Islamic group last fired its Katyusha-style rockets into Israel's Negev desert on October 6, also causing no damage.

But on September 26, three of the missiles, with a range of around eight kilometres (five miles), hit a Sderot factory, setting off a fire that injured four people.

Sharon and Arafat both locked into own political showdowns

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat both faced a political crunch as Israel's Labour party inched closer to wrecking Sharon's coalition, while Arafat had to persuade the Palestinian parliament to accept his new cabinet.

Labour's central committee met Sunday evening to give parliamentary deputies a mandate to vote down Sharon's austerity budget for 2003, despite threats from the hawkish prime minister to sack any member of his government who did not back it.

The centre-left party said that spending on controversial Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories had not been slashed, while other more pressing sectors of society were being hit hard.

Labour leader and Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer has until Wednesday, when the budget goes to vote in parliament, to either reach a compromise or see the coalition crumble.

As Sharon invoked the need for "national unity" to plot a steady course for his government, a few miles (kilometres) to the north Ramallah, Arafat was facing a possible revolt by the Palestinian parliament, dominated by his own Fatah party.

He was due to present his new cabinet to the Palestinian Legislative Council, which last month forced a previous reshuffled line-up to quit, criticising Arafat for doing too little to root out endemic corruption and mismanagement.

Arafat was let off the hook that time by an Israeli occupation army siege of his headquarters, which allowed him to delay any decision by an extra month, giving him extra time to negotiate further reshuffles with Fatah.

The resistance group has secured a promise that one of its top members, Hani al-Hassan, will take the key post of interior minister, but otherwise few major changes were made.

PHOTO CAPTION

Israeli occupation soldiers stand on a tank positioned in Tulkarem