- JERUSALEM (Agencies) -- Israeli
police stormed the square outside the Al Aqsa mosque, one of Islam's holiest
sites, to confront stone-throwing Palestinians on Friday amid heightened
tensions over Israel's West Bank barrier.
-
- Palestinians said police acted without provocation during
the 30-minute clash.
-
- Four Palestinian demonstrators and three police officers
were slightly injured.
-
- Police spokesman Gil Kleiman said officers had fired
rubber bullets and tossed stun grenades after hundreds of Muslim worshippers
"started rioting" at the end of Friday prayers near the holy
site. On Friday, witnesses said soldiers used teargas and rubber bullets
to disperse 50 stone-throwers in the West Bank town of Bethlehem near Rachel's
Tomb.
-
- Near the village of Qibya, outside the city of Ramallah,
the army also used tear gas to break up a stone-throwing demonstration.
-
- Israeli forces, uncovering a tunnel used by Palestinian
militants for deadly attack on the Gaza Strip boundary, razed at least
120 Palestinian-owned shops nearby on Friday, witnesses said. They said
two army bulldozers backed by four tanks ploughed through a cluster of
buildings leading up to Erez, a heavily fortified Israeli industrial zone
on the Gaza-Israel boundary. An Israeli army spokesman said the stores
had concealed a 60-metre tunnel discovered under Erez, which employs some
3,000 Gaza workers.
-
- Suspected Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli civilians
in an ambush on their car outside the West Bank city of Hebron on Friday,
Israeli security sources said. A Palestinian suicide bomber on a bicycle
was killed when he detonated his explosives outside a Jewish settlement
in the central Gaza Strip, an army spokesman said. Early on Friday, militants
fired an anti-tank missile that hit a house in a Jewish settlement near
Khan Younis, just north of Rafah, the Israeli army said. The Israeli army
destroyed the houses of two militants of the radical Islamic Hamas movement
in Bethlehem, military sources said.
-
- Also on Friday, security sources said Israel had held
talks with Egypt this month about ceding security control to Cairo over
a narrow corridor on the Egypt-Gaza border as part of a plan to evacuate
Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.
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- Daily Times - All Rights Reserved
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- http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-2-2004_pg1_9
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