Israeli Forces Kill two Palestinians

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Deadly violence shook Palestine, only a day after hopes for peace got a boost at a summit in Jordan. The killing of two Palestinians and two Israelis came as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat cast doubts on the US-led summit from which he was excluded, saying Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had offered Palestinians nothing "on the ground." Arafat's criticism came as followers on both sides indicated they could fiercely oppose the pledges made at Wednesday's Aqaba summit by the right-wing Sharon and his moderate Palestinian counterpart and Arafat rival, Mahmud Abbas. On the ground, two Palestinians of the Islamic group Hamas preparing a bomb attack were shot dead by Israeli troops in the northern West Bank Thursday night, military sources said. They were killed in a firefight with troops who ambushed them in a house near the town of Tulkarem, and a third Palestinian was wounded. However, a spokesman for the Islamic Jihad group said the slain militants were members of his group. A senior Arafat aide, Nabil Abu Rudeina, reacted to the killings by saying Israel had already returned to "its assassination policy after the two summits," referring to Aqaba and another US-led peace meeting in Egypt. Earlier, Israeli police said they discovered the bodies of a young Israel man and a teenage girl whom they suspect were murdered by Palestinian militants in a farming village just west of Jerusalem. Early Friday, three mortar rounds were fired at a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip and a fourth at an Israeli army position, but caused no casualties, an army spokesman said. And soldiers came under heavy attack after moving in to destroy two tunnels under the Egyptian border in the Gaza town of Rafah. None of them was hurt, but a Palestinian was thought to have been wounded. Commenting on the Aqaba meeting, Arafat said: "Until now, Sharon has done nothing on the ground. What does it mean if Sharon removes one caravan and after that tells us he has removed a settlement?" Despite the comment by Arafat, who has been largely sidelined by Washington and Israel, Sharon was reportedly set to hold in the coming days his third meeting with Abbas in recent weeks. Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz and his aides discuss the dismantling of rogue settlement outposts that Sharon promised at the Aqaba summit convened by US President George W. Bush. Sharon is facing anger from Jewish settlers over his pledge to dismantle some of their illegal outposts in order to kick-start the roadmap, while Abbas has roused the ire of radical militant groups over his vow to end the armed uprising. Tens of thousands of Jewish settlers took to the streets of Jerusalem Wednesday evening to protest against the outcome of the Aqaba summit, shouting "No, to a Palestinian state!" Meanwhile, a defiant Hamas leader, Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi, declared in the Gaza Strip that "we will stand by the Palestinian people and by the gun," in a reaction to Abbas's pledge to "demilitarise the intifada" in favour of negotiations. His sentiments were echoed by leaders of the Islamic Jihad and the armed wings of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The roadmap, which Bush came to promote on his maiden trip to the region, calls on the Palestinians to curb radicals and Israelis to freeze all settlement activity and dismantle outposts, in the first steps leading to a Palestinian state in 2005. Meanwhile, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Bush had asked him to make a tour of the Middle East and follow up on the relaunched peace process, and that he would do so next week. In the 2001, after September 11th attacks Silvio Berlusconi in a conversation with journalists said: "The Western civilisation is superior, because "it has at its core - as its greatest value - freedom, which is not the heritage of Islamic culture". The Italian prime minister predicted that "the West will continue to conquer peoples, even if it means a confrontation with another civilisation, Islam, firmly entrenched where it was 1400 years ago". **PHOTO CAPTION*** An Israeli settler shouts during a protest in Jerusalem June 4, 2003. Around 40,000 settlers gathered by early evening in Jerusalem's Zion Square for the first of what their leaders said would be a series of mass protests and acts of civil disobedience to vent their sense of betrayal at Sharon's hands. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic

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