Ramallah, 01-08-07: August began with the killing of two Palestinians and the wounding of three others during an Israeli military attack on Beit Lahiya today, part of what the Palestinian National Initiative‘s media spokesperson, Ihab Jariri described as Israel‘s "war of attrition" on the Gaza Strip.
The two men were killed as at least 30 Israeli military vehicles stormed the town from several directions on Wednesday morning, firing randomly at residents‘ homes. Israeli troops prevented ambulance services from reaching the dead and injured.
Witnesses also reported that Israeli forces bulldozed swathes of farmland in the northern Gaza Strip. This comes in the wake of a report by the Palestinian Union of Agricultural Workers today that the Israeli army destroyed 1,250 dunums of agricultural land belonging to farmers in the Gaza Strip during repeated Israeli invasions of the villages of Al-Fukhari and Jahar Al-Deek last week. The destruction caused is estimated at some US$4 million.
Jariri underlined that this latest attack was just one more in a series of ongoing Israeli military assaults on the Gaza Strip. He pointed out that 47 Gazans have been killed and 96 wounded since 20 June 2007 in a series of Israeli air, land and sea attacks.
He added that together with Israel‘s tightened stranglehold over Gaza‘s border closures, with severe humanitarian and economic implications for Gaza‘s 1.4 million inhabitants, these attacks represented a "war of attrition" being waged by Israel on the Gaza Strip.