MID-EAST REALITIES © - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 4/12: No American newspaper covers the Middle East as does The Independent in Great Britain. With Robert Fisk, based out of Beirut and the longest serving Western journalist in the region, and Phil Reeves among the Palestinians and the Israelis, The Independent is usually heads above the English rest in both its coverage and analysis. These two insightful articles from yesterday:

[The Independent - 11 April 2001]: It's strange how a war creeps up on you. First you have the warnings of an "explosion", then the first shootings. Then the first mortars, the first tank fire, the first rocket attacks. That's how it was in Lebanon. And now in 'Palestine'.

No one calls it war, of course. The Americans ignore it, the Israelis just call it "terrorist violence" ­ they are talking about Arab violence, needless to say, not their own ­ while the US TV boys still rabbit on about the chances of 'peace' negotiations. But what is going on now between Israelis and Palestinians is a civil war, a growing and major conflict between semitic peoples in a tiny land whose cull of human lives looks ever more like the early casualty lists in Lebanon.

Driving from Jerusalem to Ramallah is like driving 25 years ago from Sidon to Beirut; the checkpoints, the detours, the cartridge cases lying on the road, the gutted buildings around the City Inn. The Palestinian barrages are as scruffy as they were in Lebanon; the Israeli jeeps as ramshackle as those of the Phalange militiamen who were once Israel's allies in Lebanon.

Travel round Ramallah and the Palestinian security man reels off the local militia groups. "This old building belongs to the Tanzim," he says. Stop off to look at the wreckage of Force 17's ammunition headquarters ­ rocketed by Israeli helicopters two weeks ago ­ and a voice floats from a mosque's loudspeakers.

"Palestiiiiiine, Palestiiiiiine, Palestiiiiiine," it yodels. "That's Hamas," the young man tells me. And we all know that Islamic Jihad's 'martyrs' are presented on those posters near Al-Bireh. And that's not counting the 'Al-Shuhad' Party and the 'Al-Quds' party militants.

And look at the nearest Jewish settlements and you see armed Israeli civilians, soldiers, border guards, tank crews. If Arafat is lectured by George W Bush on the need to "control violence", who is controlling Israeli violence? It was the same in Lebanon. First they blamed each other for the war. Then they dehumanised each other. Through a spokesman in Amman, Saddam Hussein calls for God to "destroy the Jews". Then Rabbi Ovadia calls on God to "annihilate the Arabs".

In the centre of Ramallah stands the police station in which two Israeli soldiers were murdered last year. But the windows from which they were defenestrated were blasted away by Israeli missiles. Then came the Force 17 attack. Then came Monday's gun battle between Force 17 and the Israelis in which Israeli bullets smacked into a girls' school. First the police station, then the ammunition depot, then the school. The promiscuity of both Palestinian mortars in Gaza and Israeli tank-fire across the West Bank and Gaza is going soon to lead to another of Lebanon's grisly phenomena: the massacre.

In one rubbled building, a Palestinian gunman emerges to tell me that "it's getting like Hollywood around here". But he won't give his name. Another Palestinian tells me why. "Here's my Palestinian Authority ID card," he says, handing me a laminated paper with his photo, and the signature of Jamil Tarifi, the PA's minister of interior affairs.

"These cards are co-ordinated with the Israelis. See the first computer number? It's a '4'. That means I came into Palestine with the PLO. If I was born in Ramallah, it would say '9'. But if you look at the back, there's a serial number.

"If it's in large figures, it means I've been in an Israeli prison. So if the Israelis know my computer identity or number, they can work out at once if I'm what they call a 'terrorist'. And they can murder me." Yes, Israel's death squads are a reflection of the Lebanon war. Killers. Killers of settler children. Killers of Palestinian boys.

But there are differences. In Lebanon, death moved impartially through its people. Here death is administered by Israel on a far greater scale than by Palestine. Because Israel (and its settlers) are occupying Arab land. Palestine is not occupying Israel. But the rare 'security' talks between both sides are truly Lebanese. In Beirut, we used to call them ceasefires. And they were always broken.

[The Independent - 11 April 2001]: There has never been any doubt for Adbul Moez Abu Sneineh, a 40-year-old butcher, about how his father died. He gestures silently at the deep scars in the walls, gouged out by the Israeli armour-piercing machine-gun bullets that smashed through the living room window, killing his father as he was answering the telephone.

But Mr Abu Sneiheh also believes he understands why. Ultimately, he argues, the violence was because of Jewish settlers who continue to live in the heart of his home city of Hebron. Without them, there would be no need for the presence of the Israeli army among many thousands of Arabs.

And without the army ­ or so he believes ­ there would be no nightly fire-fights, no shelling by Israeli tanks of Arab homes, no deaths and daily maimings in the riot zones, no giant mounds of earth sealing off the city's entry roads.

Hebron, al-Khalil in Arabic, is the only large Palestinian city in the occupied territories where the Israeli military still exercises direct daily control over a substantial part of the population. Almost all of the 120,000 population are Palestinians. But 500 are Jewish settlers, stubbornly living in the deepest part of occupied territory, largely because they consider the city to be sacred to Judaism ­ as well as Islam and Christianity ­ as the burial site of the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Several thousand more Israeli settlers live just outside the city, in heavily guarded communities .

Sectarian relations have always been acutely sensitive in Hebron, but since the start of the Palestinian intifada the city has become one of the worst battlefields.

There are fears that an explosion is imminent, detonated by six months of bloodshed that has seen human rights abuses on a massive scale, from the killing and maiming of unarmed Arabs by the Israeli army and the fatal attacks on Jewish civilians by Palestinian gunmen, to the daily misery of punitive blockades and curfews.

Hebron, which sits in a basin 20 miles south of Jerusalem, has long been a cauldron. It was here in 1929 that 67 Jews were massacred by Arabs. Sixty-five years later, Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish-American settler, shot dead 29 Muslims while they were at prayer.

Signs are accruing that the lid could now be about to blow off the place anew, with results that will dwarf the relentless violence of the past six months in the Middle East. One Western observer said: "It will be terrible. It is not a question of whether ... It is a question of when."

The severity of the crisis, and the scale of the brutality feeding it, is documented in an 82-page report published by Human Rights Watch. Many human rights organisations have been vocal throughout the intifada, but none has provided such depth and detail. Their researchers spent five weeks in the city ­ in November last year and in February ­ conducting 180 interviews, which provide a full inventory of the horrors of the conflict.

Abuses are found on both sides ­ Palestinian gunmen are found to have violated international law by deliberately selecting and killing Israeli civilians ­ but the bulk of the blame is laid at the door of the Israeli army and the Jewish settlers whom it defends.

Its publication follows a period in which Hebron seemed to be sliding steadily towards the abyss. On 26 March, there was a furore in Israel after a Palestinian sniper shot dead Shalhavet Pass, the 10-month-old daughter of Jewish settlers, blasting her through the head in front of a city-centre Israeli settlement. The Israeli army, stationed on the surrounding hills and the rooftops of Palestinian homes, responded by firing tank shells and machine- gun bullets into the Arab neighbourhoods from where the fatal shot was fired, raising Palestinian fears that Israel was planning to reoccupy the area.

Jewish settlers have rampaged through the streets, attacking Palestinian property and in one case destroying a Palestinian shop with a pipe bomb. And the 30,000 Palestinians who live in the part of Hebron under Israeli rule, the so-called H2 zone, have been confined to their homes under military curfew, unable to send children to school, to open shops, or to go to work.

The picture that emerges from the Human Rights Watch report is especially chilling. Researchers found evidence that Israel's soldiers have killed unarmed people who pose no serious threat, fired machine- guns indiscriminately into densely populated Arab areas, assassinated suspected enemies, stood idly by as Jewish settlers attacked Palestinians and others, routinely beat up Palestinians and shot at Arab vehicles on "closed roads".

The report provides a disturbing list of examples of especially suspicious attacks by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), and demands that they be investigated.

These include two civilians who were killed when the Israeli army launched an "apparently unprovoked attack" on a communal farm operated by an Islamic charity; a 31-year-old Palestinian man shot and killed by an Israeli soldier after the soldier had started an argument by throwing rocks at his car; another youth, aged 18, who was killed by a sniper while unloading goods; a 24-year-old man, killed while driving home with his family and a 14-year-old who was killed, "apparently in retaliation for hitting a soldier with a rock earlier in the day".

It also states that many of the people killed or wounded by Israeli troops near riot zones were unarmed bystanders. There was, for example, 18-year-old Arij al-Jabali who was shot in the stairway of her home on the day she was due to introduce her boyfriend to her family. In another particularly shocking instance, Israeli soldiers shot dead a 22-year-old Palestinian as he was standing on his roof, at least 200 metres from the trouble spot.

Nor, it says, has the IDF made any serious effort to stop frequent attacks on Palestinian civilians by Jewish settlers. Settlers have attacked many Arab homes in Hebron's Old City, often directly under the eyes of IDF soldiers, and have regularly beaten, shot at and stoned Palestinians.

The Palestinians have also played their part in this increasingly dirty war, regularly firing on Jewish settlements.

There is no convincing evidence of the pro-Israel lobby's long-standing claim that Palestinians are systematically coercing children into the riot zone for use by gunmen as human shields. But Human Rights Watch listed two incidents in which Palestinian gunmen fired at the Israeli army from amid stone-throwers, putting the unarmed demonstrators in serious danger of return fire.

The group's response to its findings are blunt and resoundingly true. Hanny Megally, a senior official, said: "Hebron is a microcosm of the devastating impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on civilians. These widespread human rights abuses cannot be deferred to future negotiations."