ISRAEL: An Israeli military court last night approved the expulsion to the Gaza Strip of three family members of Palestinians suspected of involvement in the killing of Israelis, as part of the government's increasingly desperate bid to deter attacks on its civilians, writes Peter Hirschberg from Jerusalem.
The three have been given until this afternoon to appeal the decision to an Israeli civilian court. They are Ms Intisar and Ms Kifah Ajouri, the sister and brother of Mr Ali Ajouri, who is accused of providing explosive belts to suicide bombers, and Mr Abdel Nasser Asidi, brother of a Hamas militant suspected of killing several Israelis.
After Israel decided last month to deport the relatives of Palestinian militants, including suicide bombers, to Gaza, the military arrested 19 relatives of men suspected of involvement in attacks on Israelis. But the Attorney General, Mr Elyakim Rubinstein, ruled that only family members directly connected to the attacks could be deported to Gaza.
The deportation decision - as well as the policy of demolishing the homes of militants who have carried out attacks - has drawn international criticism as a form of collective punishment.
While many Israelis, terrified by the ongoing suicide bombings in their cities support the deportation policy, Mr Tally Gur, a spokesman for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, yesterday described the ruling as "an illegal, immoral decision that strays from all human rights values. The decision is a joke because if these people are dangerous, why are they releasing them to Gaza?"
The Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, contended at a cabinet meeting on Sunday that house demolitions were beginning to deter Palestinian militants, and that parents were trying to dissuade their children from carrying out attacks for fear of the consequences.
Militant Palestinian groups, however, appeared largely undeterred by the latest Israeli policy. An attempt to forge across-the-board agreement among all Palestinian groups, including the radical Islamic Hamas, for a cessation of attacks on civilians inside Israel, appeared to be falling apart last night as militant groups won out at a unity meeting in the Gaza Strip, insisting on a statement endorsing the continuation of the almost two-year-old uprising.
"We stress the legitimacy of our resistance against the [Israeli] aggression and the occupation, and the Israeli settlements," said the latest draft of a statement being discussed by 13 Palestinian groups, including Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah party.
"The idea in this initiative," said Mr Kadoura Fares, a Fatah member of the Palestinian parliament, "is to stop attacking civilians and limit the resistance" to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
But Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said they would not support a document calling for an end to attacks inside Israel. "The manifesto stresses the legitimacy of all sorts of resistance. It does not exclude anything," the PFLP leader, Mr Jamil Majdalawi, said.
Internal attempts to forge Palestinian agreement on a ceasefire stalled three weeks ago when Israel dropped a one-ton bomb in Gaza city, killing the Hamas military leader there, Mr Salah Shehadeh, and 14 civilians, including nine children. At the time Israel dismissed reports of Palestinian attempts to forge agreement over a truce as not serious.