Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2003, pages 83-86

Facts for Your Files

A Chronology of U.S.-Middle East Relations

Compiled by Robert Younes, M.D.

Oct. 1: Two Palestinian boys and an Israeli soldier were killed and dozens wounded as violence erupted in the West Bank city of Nablus.

•Amnesty International reported that 250 Palestinian and 72 Israeli children have been killed to date in the two-year-long intifada.

•In the bloodiest polling day yet in Indian-controlled Kashmir, 18 people died in the third round of elections.

•Israeli troops arrested 32 Palestinians across the West Bank, many from the town of Jenin.

Oct. 2: A U.S. Green Beret Special Operations soldier was killed in a bomb blast outside a restaurant in Zamboanga, Philippines

Oct. 3: President George W. Bush authorized $92 million for the combat training of 5,000 Iraqi dissidents to serve as battlefield advisers, scouts, and interpreters for U.S. forces.

•Marwan Bargouthi used his murder trial to attack Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, setting off fistfights among spectators as an aide distributed a 54-count indictment listing alleged Israeli war crimes against humanity.

•A Palestinian vegetable vendor was killed by machine gun fire in an open market in Jenin after the Israeli army tried to impose a curfew.

Oct. 4: Iraq’s Kurds reopened their regional parliament, aiming to put years of feuding behind them and stake a claim for autonomy from Baghdad should U.S. military forces topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussain.

•Following Pakistan’s testing of a surface-to-surface missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead 380 miles, India tested a sophisticated surface-to-air missile capable of hitting several targets.

Oct. 6: The French-flagged tanker Limburg was rammed off Yemen by a fishing boat loaded with explosives, resulting in a blast that tore a water-level hole on its side.

Oct. 7: The U.S. State Department spoke to Israeli authorities about Tel Aviv’s refusal to recognize the election over a year ago of Greek Orthodox Patriarch Eireneos I as Patriarch of the Holy Land.

Oct. 8: Israeli troops killed 13 people and wounded 80 in Khan Younis. Ten were killed when a missile was fired into a crowd of people from a helicopter.

•Two unidentified assailants attacked two U.S. Marines in Kuwait,killing one and wounding the other. The assailants, who were cousins, were killed by return fire. They had told friends and relatives that they were moved by video footage showing the Palestinians killed by an Israeli raid on Gaza days before.

Oct. 9: On Capitol Hill, religious leaders lobbied Congress to explore peaceful alternatives to a war on Iraq.

Oct. 10: Bringing to 20 the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza in the past week, two Palestinian boys were killed when they were caught in an exchange of gunfire between Israeli troops and a Palestinian fighter.

•A Palestinian suicide bomber killed himself and an Israeli woman.

•An explosion in a bus terminal in Kidapawan, Philippines, killed eight people and wounded 19.

Oct. 11: A hand grenade exploded harmlessly in Manila’s financial district and a bomb exploded in a bus in the Philippine capital, killing two and wounding 20 people.

•Thousands of Iranians marched in Tehran in support of the Palestinian intifada.

•Israeli police scuffled with Palestinians trying to enter Islam’s holiest site in Jerusalem’s Old City in defiance of an Israeli ban on entry of men under 40 to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Oct. 12: A bomb destroyed a Bali nightclub, killing 180, many of whom were Australians, and injuring scores more. A second bomb exploded near the island’s U.S. Consular office.

•At least 11 Philippine Marines were killed in a hostage rescue mission in two gun battles with Abu Sayyaf rebels on the southern island of Sulu.

•Enraging Muslims in the U.S. and abroad, conservative Baptist Rev. Jerry Falwell called the Prophet Muhammad a terrorist.

Oct. 13: In three separate confrontations, Israeli forces raiding a crowded Gaza refugee camp to raze houses killed five Palestinians, including a 4-year-old boy.

Oct. 14: Mohammad Abayat, 27, one of six Palestinians killed in violent incidents across the West Bank and Gaza, was killed by a booby-trapped telephone in Bethlehem.

•Leaders of 10 Central Asian and Caspian nations met to discuss a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would provide Kabul substantial annual transit revenues.

Oct. 15: Sudan’s government signed an agreement with rebels to suspend fighting during negotiations to end their 20-year-old war. An estimated two million Sudanese have died, mainly because of famine, and four million have been displaced.

•France, Russia, China and several other U.N. Security Council members continued to oppose a U.S.-backed resolution on Iraq.

Oct. 16: Families of seven Americans killed in the 1989 bombing of a French airliner over the Sahara Desert sued Libya for more than $3 billion.

•President Bush signed the congressional resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.

•With 100 percent of the vote, Saddam Hussain was re-elected as Iraq’s president.

•A Turkish court sentenced 10 policemen to long terms for torturing 14 teenagers suspected of belonging to an illegal left-wing group.

•Over Israeli objections, Lebanon began pumping water for southern villages from its Wazzani River, a branch of the Hasbani River that feeds the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s main source of fresh water.

•At a White House meeting, President Bush urged Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to show restraint if Iraq attacks Israel with Scud missiles, although Bush said he felt certain Israel would retaliate if attacked.

•Two thousand protesting settlers forced the Israeli government to cancel the dismantling of Havat Gilad, a rogue illegal outpost located near Nablus in the West Bank.

Oct. 17: After the army said its soldiers had been attacked by rockets, Israeli tanks fired on several Palestinian houses in Rafah, in southern Gaza, killing six Palestinians, including two children, and wounding 50.

•Two bombs exploded in a department store in the southern Christian Philippine city of Zamboanga, killing seven and wounding 150 people.

•Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan announced plans to withdraw some of their million troops from their 1,800-mile border.

Oct. 19: On a 10-day mission to Afghanistan, U.N. human rights investigator Asma Jahangir said she would investigate the deaths last year of hundreds of captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters who died while being transported to a jail in shipping containers by Northern Alliance soldiers.

Oct. 20: A bomb exploded near a crowded Catholic shrine in Zamboanga, Philippines, killing a soldier and injuring 18.

Oct. 21: Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for a car bomb loaded with 220 pounds of explosives which rammed a stopped bus near the town of Hadera in northern Israel, killing 14 Israelis and wounding 65.

•Saddam Hussain freed thousands of prison inmates, many of whom were Shi’i and political prisoners.

•A U.S. Greek Orthodox delegation met with Turkish Foreign Ministry officials to urge the reopening of Halki Greek Orthodox Theological School on Halki Island, off Istanbul.

Oct. 22: Israel demolished the family homes of a suicide bomber and a suspected militant near the West Bank city of Nablus, bringing the number of homes demolished since June 30 to more than 30.

Oct. 23: Fifty Chechen rebels stormed a crowded Moscow theater, taking as many as 700 audience members hostage and demanding that Russia end its war with the separatist southern republic.

•Israelis and Palestinians expressed reservations about a new three-stage U.S. peace initiative backed by the “Quartet” of the U.S., Russia, the U.N. and the European Union.

Oct. 24: Libya announced that it is withdrawing from the Arab League.

Oct. 25: Bahrain’s first legislative elections in nearly 30 years resulted in the election of 19 candidates to the 40-seat parliament, with the remaining 21 seats to be decided in a run-off election.

Oct. 26: During a pre-dawn commando attack Russian authorities pumped an anesthetic gas into a Moscow theater to knock out Chechen rebels holding more than 700 hostages. Fifty guerrillas and 115 hostages were killed in the raid. Two hostages earlier had died of gunshot wounds. Of the 646 former hostages hospitalized, 46 remained in critical condition.

Oct. 28: A masked gunman in Amman, Jordan assassinated USAID official Lawrence Foley.

•Three Israeli soldiers were killed and at least 18 others injured when bullets fired at a Palestinian suicide bomber just outside Ariel set off his explosives.

•Israeli forces dug ditches around Jenin and Nablus to prevent explosive-laden vehicles from reaching Israel. The West Bank town of Jericho also is surrounded by a ditch.

Oct. 29: The U.S. began releasing prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba since the fall of the Taliban last November. Still remaining at Camp X-Ray were 625 detainees of various nationalities.

•The U.S. and its allies, as well as Iran, have all but shut off the flow of illegal Iraqi oil in the Persian Gulf, with 318 ships having been boarded and 64 turned back, making the blockade 80 percent to 90 percent effective.

•As 18 people were killed in separatist violence in Indian-held Kashmir, Mufti Mohammed Syed was named to lead the coalition of his Kashmir-based People’s Democratic Party and India’s main opposition Congress Party. Syed favors talks with separatists battling Indian rule to end the 13-year rebellion that has claimed 35,000 lives.

•Israel rejected a U.S.-backed peace proposal because it is based partly on an Arab plan that calls for an Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territory and affirms the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

Oct. 30: Canada’s Foreign Ministry issued a travel advisory to its citizens born in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The advisory warned travelers to the United States that anyone born in these countries and visiting or transiting the U.S. will be photographed and fingerprinted.

•Despite oil production that was 10 percent over the 21.7 million bpd formal production ceiling, OPEC’s reference basket of seven crudes stood at $25.35 a barrel, almost at the midpoint of the target range of $22 to $28.

•After a stormy session, the 85-member Palestinian Legislative Council voted 56 to 18 to approve President Yasser Arafat’s new cabinet.

Oct. 31: After a 12-year closure, Iraq opened its Ar’ar border crossing with Saudi Arabia located 210 miles south of Baghdad, enabling 100 Saudi trade officials and businessmen to attend Baghdad’s 10-day trade fair.

•“What Arabs Think,” a survey describing the opinions of 3,200 Arabs from seven Arab countries and Israel, found that most Arabs have a negative perception of the U.S. based on its policies rather than on a dislike of Western democracy and values. Among 13 countries listed, only Israel, the United States and Britain received overall negative scores.

•The Israeli Labor Party withdrew from Prime Minister Sharon’s government, breaking up a 19-month coalition.

Nov. 1: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon negotiated with small ultra-nationalist and right-wing Orthodox parties in hopes of surviving a Knesset no-confidence vote scheduled for Nov. 4.

Nov. 3: Turkey’s Justice and Development Party with roots in political Islam won a decisive victory in national elections. The party vowed to maintain Turkey’s pro-Western stance, speed economic reform and move to join the European Union.

•Amnesty International charged Israel with violating the Geneva Conventions during its three-month campaign in Nablus and Jenin last spring. AI said that there was “clear evidence” that Israeli soldiers committed war crimes when they wantonly destroyed homes, tortured Palestinian prisoners, killed women and children and used Palestinians as human shields during military operations.

•Saudi Arabia said it would not allow the U.S. to use its facilities for an attack against Iraq.

•A Hellfire missile fired from a U.S. Predator drone over Yemen killed six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a U.S. citizen, in a vehicle about 100 miles east of Sana’a.

Nov. 4: Sharon’s government survived three no-confidence motions brought by left-wing and other opposition parties.

•In the 81st Palestinian suicide bombing since 2000, a Palestinian blew himself up in a shopping mall in Kfar Saba, north of Tel Aviv.

•European anti-terror magistrates, prosecutors, police, and intelligence officials found no evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

•Kuwait shut down the local Al Jazeera bureau, saying that the Arab world’s most popular satellite TV network was not objectively reporting recent events in Kuwait.

•Canada expressed strong objections to U.S. plans requiring Canadian citizens from most British Commonwealth nations to have a visa to travel to the United States.

Nov. 5: After failing to rebuild his crumbling government, Prime Minister Sharon dissolved the Knesset and called for elections in early 2003.

•After coming under fire by two armed Palestinians, Israeli soldiers killed one Palestinian and injured 16 others in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, also firing on Palestinian ambulances evacuating the wounded.

Nov. 6: Israeli Prime Minister Sharon named former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu foreign minister in his caretaker government.

•A Palestinian laborer killed two Israelis in a textile factory in Gaza’s Shalev Jewish settlement.

•Following the announcement of the recent U.S. missile attack on a car carrying al-Qaeda members, the U.S. Embassy in Yemen was closed for security reasons.

Nov. 7: At least 1,648 Palestinians and 625 Israelis have been killed since the current intifada began in September 2000.

•After Washington assured Canada that its citizens would not undergo special screening based on where they were born, Canada lifted its travel advisory to the U.S.

Nov. 8: Saying the U.S. military is losing momentum in the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmanGen. Richard Myers suggested it might be time for the U.S. military to “flip” its priorities from combat operations to “the reconstruction piece in Afghanistan.”

•Analysts, diplomats and administration officials said that President George W. Bush’s “road map” for Middle East peace is moribund because of Israeli indifference, Israeli politics, continued violence, and the administration’s preoccupation with Iraq. The plan called for independent Israeli and Palestinian states within a three-year period.

•The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a tough new resolution calling for Iraq to disarm or face serious consequences.

•Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, with Islamic roots, swept national elections, winning 363 of 550 parliamentary seats, prompting Turkey’s staunchly secular military to warn that it would protect the state against “fundamentalism.”

Nov. 11: Five Israelis were killed when an assassin attacked Metzer kibbutz, a collective farm of 200 families in Israel, 10 miles north of Tulkarm. The assassin escaped.

Nov. 12: The Greek Cypriot government accepted as a basis for negotiations a U.N. plan for reunification of the Mediterranean island that has been divided into ethnic Greek and Turkish enclaves since 1974. Turkey’s newly elected government has not, as yet, committed itself to negotiations. Greek and Turkish Cypriots have until Dec. 12 to reach a bare outline of a peace plan before the EU decides to admit Cyprus, divided or not, in its next expansion scheduled for 2004.

•Ignoring official warnings, thousands of Iranian students demonstrated for a fourth day against the death sentence of academic Hashem Aghjari, sentenced to hang for questioning clerical rule in the Islamic republic.

Nov. 13: Iraq accepted the tough new U.N. resolution calling for a return of weapons inspectors after four years.

•U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan denounced Israel as an expropriator of Arab land and said it must surrender nearly all the occupied territory for peace with the Arabs.

•In the southern Gaza Strip’s Rafah refugee camp, Israeli forces firing from tanks shot at a fleeing husband and wife, each with a child in their arms, and two other children trailing them, wounding the mother and killing the two-year-old son she was carrying.

Nov. 14: Mir Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani national convicted of killing two CIA workers outside the organization’s Langley, VA headquarters in 1993 to protest U.S. Mideast policy, was executed in Virginia.

Nov. 15: Palestinian gunmen ambushed Israeli soldiers and security police guarding Jewish worshippers returning from Rachel’s Tomb in Hebron, killing 12.

•Meeting in Washington, the 280-member U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 228 to 14 to issue a statement declaring that a war against Iraq lacked clear and convincing evidence of an imminent attack.

Nov. 16: In two days, Israeli forces killed seven Palestinians in Nablus, Jenin and Hebron.

•About 100 Palestinians took part in a demonstration to block Israeli bulldozers clearing land for a fence to separate the West Bank from Israel. Of the 10 activists joining them, three Americans were arrested after Israeli soldiers threw concussion grenades and tear gas to break up the demonstration. At least one protester was severely beaten.

Nov. 17: Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers took control of Hebron, clamped a curfew on its residents and arrested 40 Palestinian gunmen in response to an ambush by Palestinian gunman that killed 12 soldiers and security police.

•Former banker and economist Abdullah Gul, 52-year-old deputy chairman of the Justice and Development Party, was named prime minister of Turkey.

Nov. 18: In a three-hour raid, Israeli helicopters and tanks fired on a Palestinian security compound in Gaza City demolishing several buildings and destroying their contents.

•Supported with tanks, APCs, and a helicopter, Israeli “Musta’ribeen” border police entered the West Bank village of Saida, surrounded the home of ‘Abd al-Rahman ‘Abd al-Ghani and ordered Riyad ‘Abd al-Ghani to leave the house. When his two brothers Mohammad, 25, and Imad, 29, exited the house, the Israeli forces opened fire without warning, killing Mohammad instantly and hitting Imad twice in the legs.

•Dozens of Kiryat Arba settlers staked new outposts on Palestinian land in al-Nassara Valley, east of Hebron, on land belonging to the Jaber and Da’na families, where an ambush killed 12 Israeli soldiers three nights earlier.

•Israeli military forces destroyed the deeply buried main water pipe line supplying areas east of Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip, depriving 50,000 people of clean water and forcing residents to travel long distances on foot or on donkeys to draw water from small wells on the outskirts of the city. Sami Abu Salim head of Deir al-Balah municipality, said this incident was the fourth time during the current intifada that Israeli forces had intentionally bulldozed the main water line.

•After a four-year absence, U.N. weapons inspectors returned to Iraq. UNMOVIC head Hans Blix said inspections could begin as early as Nov. 27.

•The number of deserters—most of them reservists—from Israel Defense Forces was put at 2,616, compared to 1,564 deserters recorded in the corresponding period of last year, for an increase of 67.2 percent.

•As thousands of Pakistanis chanted anti-American slogans, the body of Mir Aimal Kansi arrived home and was carried for 10 miles on the shoulders of young men to his family home in Quetta.

•As British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that Britons should consider leaving Yemen, the British Embassy in Yemen closed for an undetermined time.

•The predominantly American Jakarta International School, the Australian International School, and the British International School in Indonesia closed because of security concerns.

•Sudan’s warring factions agreed to extend a cease-fire until the end of scheduled peace talks on March 31.

Nov. 19: Indonesia’s government and separatist rebels in Aceh, on Sumatra’s northern tip, agreed to sign a treaty in Geneva on Dec. 9 to end 26 years of fighting that has killed at least 12,000 people.

•Following a 3.2 percent drop in 2001, Israel’s standard of living dropped an unprecedented 3.6 percent in the first nine months of 2002. Since the beginning of the current intifada, Israel’s GDP per capita has dropped 10 percent and its industrial output 11 percent.

Nov. 20: Turkey said it was willing to negotiate plans for the reunification of Cyprus.

•During the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims are obliged to abstain from food and drink during daylight hours, Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near Bethlehem recently forced Muslims to eat and drink, therefore breaking their fast.

•Israel’s Labor Party elected dovish Amram Mitzna, mayor of Haifa and former army general, as its leader in upcoming national elections against Likud’s popular Ariel Sharon. Mitzna declared that, if elected prime minister, he would order the immediate evacuation of the Israeli army and settlers from the Gaza Strip.

•According to a study by UNRWA, the U.N. branch that deals with refugees, 70 percent of Palestinians in the occupied territories live below the poverty line, earning less than NIS 1,600 per month ($1.66/day/person) for a family of six people. UNRWA provides grocery aid to 220,000 Palestinian families, compared to the 11,000 families receiving it before the onset of the intifada. The study also showed that 22 percent of Palestinian children are malnourished.

•Israeli soldiers in Tulkarm shot in the chest and killed Amr Salman al-Qudsi, 13, who had been throwing stones at Israeli tanks on his way back from school, after finding the school had been closed due to the Israeli curfew.

Nov. 21: A suicide bomber killed 11 passengers and wounded 48 on a bus in Jerusalem’s Kiryat Menachem neighborhood during rush hour.

•Israel submitted a special request for $14 billion in U.S. economic aid, including a $4 billion special military grant and $10 billion for U.S. loan guarantees for Israeli government loans on overseas markets.

•A 31-year-old American missionary was shot three times in the head and killed as she was about to unlock the door of a church-run medical clinic in Sidon, Lebanon, at 7 a.m.

•Two U.S. soldiers in civilian clothes and driving a civilian car were shot and wounded by a Kuwaiti traffic policeman when he stopped them for speeding on a road 35 miles south of Kuwait City. The policeman fled to Saudi Arabia after the shooting.

•Paving the way for the formation of a coalition government, Pakistan’s parliament chose as prime minister moderate Zafarullah Khan Jamali, who has the support of the military.

Nov. 22: For the fourth time in 12 months, more than 30 Israeli tanks and 70 armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and helicopters reoccupied the holy towns of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahour and the villages of Irtas, and Al-Khader and re-imposed a curfew on an estimated 80,000 inhabitants. With troops in Bethlehem, Israeli forces reoccupied all of the major Palestinian population centers in the West Bank except for Jericho.

•Israeli troops shot and killed Iain Hook, 50, a British U.N. official in Jenin, and wounded an Irish national as she tried to herd children into safer ground during the same incident.

•Saudi Arabian authorities arrested a Kuwaiti policeman accused of the Nov. 21 shooting of two U.S. soldiers.

•Imam Samudra, a 40-year-old Indonesian engineer, confessed to planning the Bali bombing that took the lives of over 190 people, as well as to planning a number of bombings over the past two years. No direct link, as yet, has been established between Samudra’s group and al-Qaeda.

•The State Department offered to allow U.S. Embassy dependents living in Amman to return home to the United States.

•Israeli occupation authorities issued new work policies in the Eretz industrial zone in the northern Gaza Strip, forbidding Gazans from wearing shoes, coats, or bringing food from home.Israeli sources defended the new policies by claiming they would prevent the smuggling of weapons.

•Abdel-Rahman Al-Ahmar, a field researcher with the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG) who has been imprisoned by Israeli authorities several times in the past, was again arbitrarily arrested and was being detained at the Etzion Detention Center. The United Nations lodged a protest with the IDF, saying soldiers held an Israeli U.N. staffer, attorney Allegra Pacheco, at gunpoint in the open air for two hours while her house was searched and Al-Ahmar, her husband, arrested.

Nov. 23: Announcing that its 30 to 40 volunteers there will evacuate the country, the Peace Corps suspended operations in Jordan.

•Israeli soldiers killed nine Palestinians, including three children, and shot and killed Jihad Natour, a Ramadan drummer waking residents of the Al Askar refugee camp at 3 a.m. for breakfast.

•Villagers from Asmout, east of Nablus, near the illegal Israeli settlement of Allon Moriah, reported that a 3-mile ditch, 13 feet wide and 10 feet deep, had been dug around their village and will meet another ditch surrounding the villages of Salam, Beit Dajan, Deir Al-Hattab and Beit Fouriq.

•Britain demanded that Israel investigate its killing of British U.N. aid worker Iain Hook.

Nov. 24: Israeli occupation soldiers barred Christian worshippers from the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, pushing, beating, and dragging to the ground Christian worshippers on their way to the church. As the army declared the Church and vicinity, including Manger Square, a closed military zone, Tourism Minister Yitzhak Levy said no pilgrims would be admitted to the Church of Nativity for Christmas, because of the recent increase in terror attacks.

•Israeli occupation soldiers blew up the main entrance of a mosque in Jenin before entering and desecrating the holy place, and arresting the mosque’s imam and muezzin.

Nov. 25: Israeli Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna pledged to disengage from the West Bank and Gaza with or without an accord.

•Israeli soldiers in Nablus killed 8-year-old Jihad Al-Faqih on his way back from school when he ignored a curfew and threw stones at an Israeli jeep.

•Tamil rebels rejected a call to renounce violence in their fight to establish a Tamil state in the Northeast of Sri Lanka. Approximately 64,000 people have been killed in the 19 year-old separatist war. The rebels had laid down their arms under a February truce and were committed to peace talks.

•AFL-CIO union members petitioned the federation’s officers deploring the union’s support for the Israeli invasion of the West Bank.

Nov. 26: Israel submitted a request for $14 billion in economic aid to U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

•Hate crimes against Arabs in the U.S increased 1500 percent, from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001, the increase occurring after the Sept. 11 terror attack.

•Using helicopter gunships and armor, Israeli forces battled Palestinians in a fierce firefight in a Gaza raid, taking 25 prisoners and blowing up a four-story building. In the West Bank village of Kufr Kalil, near Nablus, 11 Palestinians were detained in a raid by 200 Israeli troops using heavy armor.

•A month after the surprise election of a new state government in Kashmir, suspected Muslim gunmen killed more than 40 people in attacks over the weekend.

•Viewing him as “the lesser evil,” the Palestinian National Authority voiced support for Labor candidate Mitzna, who served as chief of the Central Command, supervising Israel’s attempt to suppress the first intifada by enforcing Yitzhak Rabin’s call to “break their bones.” Mitzna also established and populated Israel’s notorious Ansar II prison at Ketziot.

Nov. 27: Lawyers representing victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre welcomed the Belgian Supreme Court’s decision to quash the Court of Appeals’ ruling that universal jurisdiction can only be exercised when the accused (in the Sabra and Shatila case, Ariel Sharon) is on Belgian territory.

•An Israeli missile fired by either an Apache helicopter or by an F-16 fighter jet was thought to have caused the explosion of a house in the Jenin refugee camp, killing two suspected high-level Palestinian militants.

•International arms inspectors completed their first field mission in four years in their search for banned Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

•Field commander Imam Samudra, 40, arrested for the deadly bomb blast in Bali that killed over 190 people, admitted an association with Riduan Isamuddin, al-Qaeda’s point man in Southeast Asia.

•Indonesian officer Enrico Guterres was sentenced to 10 years in prison for leading the Dili-based Aitarak militia and for crimes against humanity in an attempt to prevent East Timor’s independence from Indonesia.

Nov. 28: Prime Minister Sharon rejected Jordan’s request that Israel issue a public declaration opposing the “transfer” of Palestinians from the West Bank.

•Three gunmen were killed after they shot dead two Israelis and wounded 20 near a bus station and polling station in Beit Shean in northern Israel .

Nov. 29: On the 55th anniversary of U.N. Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine into two states, and the 25th anniversary of the U.N. Day in Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Muslims worldwide observed Al-Quds Day to condemn Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Nigeria, Bahrain, South Africa, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, and Bangladesh demanding an end to Israeli persecution and killing of Palestinian civilians as well as the prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Sharon as a war criminal.

•Five minutes after two heat-seeking missiles were fired at but missed an Israeli airliner as it took off from the Mombassa, Kenya airport, three suicide bombers crashed a vehicle packed with explosives into an Israeli-owned resort hotel in Mombassa, killing three Israelis and 12 Kenyans.

•In a show of solidarity, rival Iraqi Kurd leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani met in Brussels with EU representative Javier Solana.

Nov. 30: Turkey lifted a 15-year state of emergency in the southeast provinces of Sirnak and Diyarbakir. The move ended an era in which security forces wielded sweeping powers against Kurdish separatists in a conflict that claimed 30,000 lives, with thousands of others fleeing to the major cities to escape violence, emptying hundreds of villages.

•Tightening security around its missions worldwide, Israel temporarily closed its embassies in the Philippines and South Africa and announced it may shut down additional diplomatic missions following twin attacks on Israeli tourists in Kenya.

•The Bush administration informed the Palestine National Authority that the release of the so-called “roadmap” to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would not be ready by its Dec. 20 target date, and most likely would be delayed until after Israel’s Jan. 28 general elections.