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Militant Palestinians join forces to launch assaults on Israelis
By Jon E. Dougherty
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
WEDNESDAY
NOVEMBER 1
2000
Israeli officials say they believe radical and militant Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah have come together to plan past and future terrorist attacks against the Jewish state.
The new cooperative effort, which comes with the blessing of some Palestinian Authority security personnel, is believed responsible for terrorist attacks recently in the Gaza Strip, officials said, according to the daily Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.
Each group, Israeli security officials believe, has contributed specific skills and expertise to the planning of new attacks. Officials also said yesterday they worry that the cooperative effort will eventually produce more sophisticated and deadly attacks in Israel proper.
"One [new] warning refers to a possible car-bomb attack within the Dan Region," the paper said.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority released nine more members of the Hamas organization from a prison in the Nablus region before Israeli helicopter gunships attacked the region.
The Fatah faction is loyal to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
The fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in the month-long conflict, which has killed 148 people, also threatens to divide Israel from other Arab nations with which the Jewish state had previously reconciled.
As the sixth anniversary last week of a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan went unnoticed, security experts in the Mideast say the longer the violence continues, the more pressure the Jordanian government will be under to break ties with the Jewish state.
Since the violence began Sept. 28, reports said some of the largest street protests in years have taken place in Amman -- the capital of Jordan -- with sympathy for the Palestinians running at new highs.
In 1994, Jordan elected to become the second nation after Egypt to sign a formal peace deal with Israel as a means to improve its weak economy. But the new violence -- and the new sympathy within its population of 5 million, most of whom claim Palestinian descent -- threatens once again to undermine the country's economic progress, experts said in published reports yesterday.
"Unfortunately, since the peace treaty, our economy is retreating and poverty and unemployment have increased," Salameh al-Hiyari, a local deputy from the city of Salt, told reporters from the Dawn Newspaper Group.
Hence, experts said, deteriorating economic conditions coupled with high anti-Israel sentiment could eventually force the Jordanian leadership -- if the conflict lasts -- to reconsider its ties to Israel.
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