Zionists Should be Destroyed: Fatah member
Honi al-Hassan, who was talking to the Al-Jazeera Qatari television on the 53rd anniversary of the occupation of Palestine, said: "We are mourning now, but will one day celebrate the rebirth of the country of Palestine.
He said, "Now there is only one person against us called (Ariel) Sharon. If he falls the Zionist regime will fall, and Palestine, with Al-Qods as the capital, will be established.
He said: Palestine will be free of Zionist settlements; now 40 percent of settlers have already left the West Bank since Sharon cannot guarantee their security.
On America's position on the issue, Al-Hassan said (George W.) Bush knows very well that he should pass Palestine in order to reach the Middle East, and recently we have observed good stances taken by the American government especially on the issue of the Zionist settlements.
He further said that continuation of the Intifada would muster worldwide support for the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, another story said a number of 350 Jewish thinkers and scholars in a statement called for stationing of international forces in Palestine to restore peace in the lands.
The statement said, "We Israeli citizens are deeply concerned of the increasing crisis in the West Bank and believe by construction of settlements in the Palestinian lands Israel had invaded Palestinians' rights.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians mark their most somber day of national loss on Tuesday against a backdrop of heightened bloodshed in which Zionist troops killed seven Palestinians.
Palestinians held peaceful marches across the West Bank and Gaza. A siren for three minutes of silence was to punctuate the commemoration of the Nakba, or great catastrophe, when 700,000 Palestinians became refugees in the Arab-Israeli War that followed creation of Zionist entity in 1948.
The number of refugees has since swelled to about four million people in camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring Arab states, where demonstrations were also held.
Israel braced for new battles on Tuesday, concerned that the most emotionally charged day of the Palestinian calendar could spawn heavier fighting in a nearly eight-month-old revolt for statehood in the West Bank and Gaza.
Palestinians say the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza dating to the 1967 Middle East War, and an economically crippling closure of these areas, have incited the violence.
Israeli troops killed seven Palestinians including five paramilitary policemen on Monday in what the United States called a "very disturbing" flareup.
The killing of the police in the West Bank was the highest death toll in a single incident for almost two months and elicited harsh words from Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who called it "dirty and immoral".
"Israel must know that it will be harshly judged over this crime," Arafat told reporters.
Arafat vowed on Tuesday that his people would not surrender in their struggle for an independent state and pledged to raise the Palestinian flag over Arab Bait-ul-Moqaddas.
"Enough to killing and destruction of the Palestinian people -- who cannot be defeated no matter how much the aggressors attack us with their weapons of destruction," Arafat said in the televised speech, wearing his military uniform and a traditional Palestinian keffiyah on his head.
Israeli forces killed a bodyguard of the founder of the Islamic group Hamas on Tuesday and wounded six other people, Palestinian police and Hamas officials said.
Hamas officials said the killing was an assassination and vowed revenge.
The Israeli Army said a tank shell struck two Palestinians who had exited a car and launched a mortar bomb near the Nahal Oz checkpoint on the Gaza-Israel border.
Palestinian police said only one man had been killed. They said Israeli tanks at Nahal Oz fired three shells and opened heavy fire at a Palestinian police post on the Gaza side, also hitting a car in which the man was killed. Six other people in the area were wounded, the police said.
Palestinians identified the man killed as Abdel Hakim al-Manaema, a bodyguard to Hamas founder Shiekh Ahmed Yassin.
Also, a 17-year-old Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli soldiers near the Erez checkpoint on the border with Israel, becoming the second Palestinian to die in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, security sources said.
Mohammed Jihad abu Jassem from Jabalia refugee camp was killed by a live round fired by Israeli soldiers who were facing a group of stonethrowers, the security sources said.
And Abdel Jawad Shehadi, aged 18, a member of Palestinian military intelligence but who was wearing civilian clothes, was shot dead during clashes in the West Bank town of Ramallah that also saw some 18 people wounded, including a French journalist, Palestinian medical and security sources said.
Medical sources said 40 people had been wounded in the Gaza Strip, with violent confrontations near the flashpoint Jewish settlement of Netzarim, the nearby Karni crossing into Israel, Khan Younes refugee camp and Kfar Darom further to the south.
Three Palestinians were seriously wounded, including a seven-year-old boy from Khan Younes, the sources said. Israeli tanks had also blocked the road between the north and south of the Gaza Strip, witnesses said.
In Haris, southwest of Nablus, Issa Souf, 31, was in critical condition after being shot in the chest by Israeli forces, sources there said.
In the meantime, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hamid Reza Assefi on Tuesday voiced Iran's support for the Palestinian Intifada to liberate their territories from Zionist occupation.
The spokesman made the statement to mark 53 years of occupation of Palestine and the Zionist movement embarked on conspiracies to bring about hostility between the Muslim and Jews communities in Palestine. Assefi said that the Zionist regime is an illegitimate entity that has occupied the holy lands of Palestine for more than fifty years and brought the Middle East to a state of complicated and deep-rooted crisis.
"The Palestinian cause is the symbol of solidarity and unity among Islamic nations against Zionist occupation force and that the wide-scale uprising of the Palestinians with its latest wave of Al-Aqsa Mosque Intifada is a turning point drawing the attention of the Muslim world to the plight of Palestine.
Also, Egyptians demonstrated and staged symbolic strikes on Tuesday to mark Nakba or "catastrophe" of the creation of Israel 53 years ago, demanding ties with the Zionist state to be severed.
More than 100 people gathered at the Arab League Headquarters in Cairo, shouting anti-Israeli slogans and holding Palestinian flags, waving banners calling for a boycott of "Zionist goods" and denouncing Egyptian trade with Israel.
Amidst a heavy security presence, they later submitted a letter to Arab League Secretary General Esmat Abdel Meguid calling on Arab states to "break off relations with Israel and end normalization."
Egyptian journalists meanwhile went on strike for around 15 minutes at noon (0900 GMT) to protest the "massacres of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces," journalists said.
Some journalists staged a symbolic sit-in at their union's headquarters in Cairo, they said.