Despite direct calls from President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell for Israel to immediately to end its violent incursions into Palestinian cities and withdraw all of its forces from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip territories under Palestinian Authority control, Israel today gravely escalated its aggression.

Early on Wednesday morning, Israeli occupation troops and tanks invaded and sealed off the village of Beit Rima, near Ramallah. In an ongoing assault, Israeli troops have killed at least ten Palestinians in the village, injured and arrested dozens of others and have ransacked most of the houses. According to eyewitnesses, Israeli occupation forces have not permitted ambulances to enter the village. Consequently dead and injured people lay in the streets and in olive groves for hours unattended.

At least twenty six other Palestinians have been killed, including at least three children, since October 18 by Israeli occupation troops who have seized all or part of the cities of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Ramallah, Qalqilya and Tulkarem, and tightened the siege on all other Palestinian towns and villages. Under the 1993 Oslo Accords and subsequent agreements, Israeli forces had withdrawn from eighteen percent of the occupied West Bank, areas now largely reoccupied by Israeli forces.

On the first day of the incursions, 10 year old Riham Ward was killed by live ammunition to the chest while attending school in Jenin. Basil Salim Al-Mubasher, 14, from Khan Yunis, was killed when he picked up an unexploded Israeli tank-shell that landed near his house following during the night of 18 October. On October 20, Israeli occupation forces killed 17 year-old Johnny Thalgieh, an altar boy at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity where tradition holds Jesus Christ was born, while he was walking in Manger Square.

Israel also shelled Bethlehem's Holy Family maternity hospital, and cut off electricity to the five thousand residents of Aida and Azza refugee camps.

Israeli death squads continue to carry out extrajudicial executions of Palestinians using American supplied Apache helicopters.

Since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, more than 650 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces, over 4000 homes have been destroyed or damaged and hundreds of thousands of trees and olive groves, the economic livelihood of Palestinian farmers, have been uprooted by Israel, which has relentlessly strangled the Palestinian economy with relentless blockades and closures.

ACTION REQUESTED

Please contact the following officials to request that:

*The United States acts swiftly to ensure that Israel immediately halts its violent actions and withdraws forthwith from all the territory it has reoccupied;

*That the United States insists Israel obeys United Nations Security Council resolution 1322 (October 7, 2000) which calls on Israel, "the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and its responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949;"

*And that Israel immediately implement the recommendations of the Mitchell Commission and accept negotiations for a just settlement to the conflict based on Security Council Resolution 242.

President George Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20500
president@whitehouse.gov

Secretary of State Colin Powell
Department of State
Harry S Truman Building
2201 C. Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
secretary@state.gov
202-647-5291