Palestinians seek urgent UN action as Israel tightens West Bank blockade

by Hisham Abdallah

RAMALLAH, West Bank, (AFP) - Israel further tightened its choking blockade on the Palestinian territories Sunday, using tanks to seal off a swathe of the West Bank and prompting Palestinian calls for urgent UN action to end the siege.

"The new Israeli government and its prime minister have officially launched a new war against the Palestinian people," Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said.

He said Israel had closed off Palestinian towns and villages, banned movement of goods and people and moved in heavy armour and tanks as part of a "100 days war" aimed at crushing the five-and-a-half month intifada or Palestinian revolt.

In a move affecting thousands of Palestinians, the army was preventing cars from travelling between the West Bank town of Ramallah and Jerusalem, and established a new checkpoint on the main road near the Qalandia refugee camp, witnesses said.

It also erected makeshift roadblocks with piles of dirt and rocks on roads previously used by Palestinians to skirt the closure and sealed off dozens of villages in a radius of around 30 kilometres (20 miles), they said.

Several people were wounded, including one woman, when Israeli soldiers fired against Palestinian protestors throwing stones at Qalandia where queues of people were waiting to cross, witnesses said.

The Palestinian Authority called for an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council on the closure which it called an "escalation of war." It urged the United Nations, Arab League and countries friendly to their cause to "move to bring an end to this new racist Israeli policy that can lead to a full explosion in the entire region."

The action came only days after the inauguration of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a hardliner who has vowed not to resume negotiations or ease the blockade until there is an end to the cycle of violence that has cost 435 lives.

The Israeli army, which first slapped the closure around the territories after the eruption of the intifada in late September, denied its actions constituted "collective punishment," saying it had strengthened the blockade around Ramallah because of numerous attacks.

"The Palestinian Authority is first and foremost hurting its residents by initiating terror attacks from within its territory and therefore forces the army to take security steps to defend the peace and security of the citizens of Israel," it added. "This is not a collective punishment but preventative steps that the situation requires."

For thousands of Palestinians, driving around the West Bank has become a nightmare, with the Israeli army setting up checkpoints in an effort to contain the intifada or uprising and digging trenches or tearing up roads in several areas.

"I woke up this morning to find that there is a new world out there," said Ahmed Rahman, who said it took him took two and a half hours to complete a five-kilometre (three-mile) trip between the village of Beit Hanina and Ramallah, where he works in a local government ministry.

The blockade has cost the Palestinian economy upwards of one billion dollars according to UN figures and sent unemployment and poverty rates soaring. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian witnesses and security officials said Israeli army bulldozers had flattened large tracts of farmland near the Karni crossing point into Israel and had destroyed a cement factory. The army denied this.

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot said Friday that Sharon had accepted an army plan to effectively slice up the Palestinian territories to isolate major trouble spots and combat terrorism more effectively.

But Sharon told the US magazine Newsweek that he would not send the Israeli army back into areas ceded to the control of the Palestinian Authority.