Palestinian Youths Had a Dream, Families Say

Two 15-year-old Palestinian cousins and their 16-year-old friend had a dream, their families said -- to die for the Palestinian cause. On Thursday, the boys were buried in the Gaza Strip, hours after being shot dead by Israeli troops as they made what apparently was an inept attempt to infiltrate a Jewish settlement.

None of the Palestinian militant groups operating in Gaza claimed any connection with the failed attack, suggesting that the youths had acted on their own. Several times in recent months, teenage boys in Gaza have staged what amounted to self-appointed suicide missions, acting independently to try to kill settlers or soldiers.

In contrast to well-armed Palestinian militants who have carried out a string of carefully planned attacks on Jewish settlers -- including an assault that killed four Jewish seminary students last week in the West Bank -- the three boys were armed only with a knife and a pair of wire cutters, the army said.

“Thank God, he got what he always wanted -- martyrdom,” Atteyeh Dawais, the father of Mohammed Dawais, one of the slain youths, told reporters in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp. About 1,500 chanting Palestinians joined a funeral march through the camp’s narrow streets.

The Israeli military defended the shooting of the three as permissible under rules of engagement that allow soldiers to fire on any Palestinian who ventures into exclusionary zones around the Gaza settlements, whether or not a specific threat can be ascertained. Similar no-go areas are to be set up around some West Bank settlements, Israeli authorities have said.

Elsewhere, incidents of violence claimed at least two other lives, under circumstances that illustrated the relentless and seemingly random nature of the conflict.

Near the West Bank Jewish settlement of Bekaot in the Jordan Valley, Israeli police on Thursday recovered the body of a 70-year-old Israeli man, Massoud Elon, who had disappeared the evening before. A Palestinian militia, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, claimed responsibility for his abduction and killing.

During 27 months of bloody Israeli-Palestinian fighting, Israeli authorities have warned Israeli Jews to stay out of the West Bank and to exercise caution even in Arab communities inside Israel.

But Elon, like many Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries, was comfortable with the Arabic language and culture, and continued to frequent Arab villages, believing that friendly ties with local people would protect him.

His son, Yaakov, told Israel Radio that his father regularly went to the small West Bank Palestinian village of Tubas, near which his burned-out car and scorched body were found, to hand out secondhand clothes to village children.

A Palestinian man, meanwhile, died in an explosion in a village outside the West Bank city of Ramallah. Palestinian officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the blast appeared to be a “work accident” -- the term Israelis and Palestinians use to describe a premature explosion when a bomb is being made or transported.

As always, luck and lack of it played a part in whether people caught up in the conflict lived or died.

In an Israeli farming village near the northern West Bank, an Israeli couple, immigrants from Switzerland, had a narrow escape after a Palestinian gunman burst into their home late Wednesday. They managed to flee when his M-16 rifle jammed.

“I shouted to my wife in French to get out,” recounted Ronald Mori, the homeowner, who said the gunman got off a single wild shot at the couple. He told reporters that his wife jumped out the bedroom window while he hurled dinner plates at the gunman before pushing past him and running out the front door.

Paramilitary border police surrounded the house in the village of Maor, three miles from the West Bank, and killed the gunman after a standoff lasting more than two hours, Israeli authorities said.

Israel pushed ahead with a campaign of arrests of militant leaders in commando-style raids, coupled with large-scale military incursions into Palestinian towns and refugee camps. Troops backed by helicopter gunships pushed their way into three refugee camps in the Gaza Strip but pulled back later Thursday.

Daylight raids, however, are increasingly common.

A local leader of the Tanzim militia, Akhram abu Bakar, was arrested by soldiers in the northern West Bank town of Tulkarm, and in Ramallah, undercover soldiers swooped into the main downtown market to seize two other militants of the Tanzim, which is linked to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction.

In a Tel Aviv courtroom, pandemonium broke out at the start of a hearing for Marwan Barghouti, a senior Tanzim leader on trial for masterminding terrorist attacks against Israelis that claimed 26 lives.

The handcuffed Barghouti was dragged out of the courtroom by police after a shouting match that ended with him falling or being knocked to the floor. “The intifada will win!” Barghouti, 43, yelled before being hauled away.

His lawyer, Jawad Boulous, said his client refused to return to the courtroom in protest of his treatment. At the hearing’s end, the judge ruled that Barghouti would remain jailed for the duration of his trial.

Barghouti has said he does not recognize Israel’s right to try him.