LATEST NEWS FROM PERDANA GLOBAL PEACE ORGANISATION

Lest We Forget

The war in Iraq has entered its 6th year. It was supposed to be a war to stop Iraq’s Weapon of Mass Destruction. No WMD was found.

Then it became a war to remove Saddam Hussein and his dictatorship. Now Saddam has been eliminated, murdered by the regime that displaced him.

But is Iraq a better country now?

Is Iraq a safer country now?

Only a murderous man like Bush would shamelessly claim things are alright in Iraq. But the world knows that Iraq is now worse, very much worse than when it was under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

Hundreds of thousands of people who should be alive and well have now been killed. Many more have been gravely injured. The democracy in Iraq is a sham. Nothing good has come from the war to “Shock and Awe” against Iraq.

This horrible tragedy is brought about by warmongers, by people who believe that war can solve international problems. This has been brought about by the faith in the idea that killing people brings about peace.

When will we learn that war solves nothing, that war breeds more war, that war between unequals breeds terror for everyone, the guilty and the innocent.

War is a crime and those who launch wars are criminals, are murderers. Murderers should be tried and punished, by hanging until they are dead or being incarcerated for the rest of their lives.

Until war is made a crime and the criminals are punished, the world of the 21st Century cannot claim to be civilized.

Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad
Founder/Chairman

March 21, 2008

The Perdana Global Peace Organisation (PGPO) notes with grief the 5th anniversary of the Iraqi invasion by the United States and its allies.

In 2003, President George Bush announced to the world that he was to send American troops into the sovereign state of Iraq to liberate its people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein as well as destroy terrorist cells allegedly linked to the September 11 attacks in New York.
Today, more than a million Iraqis have died in the war that was supposedly waged to bring them freedom. No evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction was ever found and earlier this week, the Pentagon admitted what the world already knew from the start ? Iraq had nothing to do with September 11.

This country, once the cradle of civilisation, is now a failed state that has resulted in one in five Iraqis being a refugee. In a country that boasted a population of 27 million before the illegal invasion, this constitutes genocide of the highest order.

Despite this, President Bush continues to defend the 3 trillion dollar conflict as one that was necessary. It is without a doubt that the only necessity this war was pursued was for the United States and its allies to control the flow of oil in West Asia.

Money was the primary objective, not global security.

The dead in Iraq need their justice. The warmongers who made the decision to destroy this country must be put on trial for their war crimes. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard all have blood on their hands and the world must recognise the fact that these men are murderers. They cannot be allowed to write their own history and be portrayed as saviours.

PGPO welcomes recent comments made by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court who has not ruled out the fact that Bush and Blair may be prosecuted for their war crimes in The Hague. It is heartening to know that the strength of the global anti-war movement expands by the day and let us hope this war ceases to exist as soon as possible as it has been 5 years too long.

We at PGPO will continue our campaign to make all wars illegal and we hope our humble efforts go in some way to make the world a more secure place.

Dato’ Mukhriz Mahathir
Executive Director
Perdana Global Peace Organisation

From The Independent 19 March 2008

Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a “hell disaster”.

But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry ? but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.

Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people ? the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world ? not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam’s links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn’t plan for the aftermath of war?

Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning ? of which more later ? but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.

As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I’d brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror ? I recommend the Battle of Borodino ? along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: “With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.

“They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”

How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill’s brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.

On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia ? “Mission Accomplished” ? and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians ? ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents ? annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus’s head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.

To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair ? as we should always have called this small town lawyer ? should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war ? and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper ? daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?

But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith’s proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us ? be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or “terrorism” ? are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.

Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam’s capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.

But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had “penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks”.

Why didn’t Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere “dead-enders”.

On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: “The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune.” Why didn’t Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved ? even just a few tears for a minute or so ? for the Iraqis?

For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders “the Allies” ? they did, by the way ? and painting Saddam’s regime as the Third Reich.

Of course, when I was at school, our leaders ? Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States ? had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.

Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen ? Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz ? have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like “Shock and Awe” appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.

Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won’t even account for Iraq until the war is over.

It is a grotesque truism that today ? after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago ? we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).

They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq ? 176 ? is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq ? 29,395 ? is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).

Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead ? they range from 350,000 up to a million ? these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom ? 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded ? from 1940 to 1945.

Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or ? more terrible still ? two Hiroshimas.

Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan’s warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.

America’s massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?

We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa’ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto ? in Afghanistan ? unheard of suicide bomber.

And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to “lose” Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror ? yes, our terror ? of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and “terror”. But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and “terror”. It’s not too complicated an equation. And we don’t need a public inquiry to get it right.

From The Independent:

The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain. It has been small but we achieved nothing. It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish.

The British failure in the Iraq war has been even more gross because it has not ended with a costly military victory but a humiliating scuttle. The victors in Basra and southern Iraq have been the local Shia militias masquerading as government security forces.

Britain should immediately hold a full inquiry into the mistakes made before and during the war in Iraq out of pure self-interest. Gordon Brown’s suggestion that holding such an inquiry now would somehow threaten the stability of Iraq is either a piece of obvious prevarication or, if taken at face value, a sign of absurd vanity. Iraqis show not the slightest interest in British policy and assume it will simply be an echo of decisions made in Washington.

I have watched this war being fought over the last five years and I never for a moment felt that the Government in London had the slightest idea of the type of conflict in which it was engaged. It has become common for supporters and opponents of the war to argue patronisingly that what was needed was a plan about what to do after the war, as if this would have reconciled Iraqis to be occupied by foreign powers.

Those British officers I met over the years had an acute idea of why intervention in Iraq was a very bad idea but had become used to being ignored. A few would claim that Britain had rich experience of counter- insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s and Northern Ireland after 1968. “The situation in Basra was exactly the opposite,” one former British military intelligence officer exclaimed to me impatiently. “In Malaya and Northern Ireland, we had the support of the majority but in Basra we have no allies.”

How we got into this situation needs to be inquired into and also how we avoid falling into it again. The worst failings were political. In many ways Tony Blair in 2002-03, when he decided to join America in the war, resembled Neville Chamberlain in 1938. He ignored expert professional advice. He had no alternative plan if anything went wrong. He lived in a world of propaganda and fantasy. He would spring from his plane in Baghdad to be greeted by Iraqi politicians who did not dare leave the Green Zone.

There are 175 British servicemen who have died for nothing. The troops stationed outside Basra do nothing except show the US that they have one ally left.

The British Government throughout the whole war has shown an extraordinary degree of arrogance and ignorance of history. They did not seem to know that three years after Britain captured Baghdad in 1917 it was fighting a ferocious tribal revolt along the valley of the Euphrates.

It does not require much knowledge to understand that any country should be chary of being sucked into small wars. The Duke of Wellington, who had seen what had happened to Napoleon in Spain, said that “Great powers do not have small wars”. Most of the reasons why Britain should not have allowed itself to become the unquestioning ally of America in what became an imperial occupation are obvious.

America and Britain discovered Iraq was a quagmire still. If the military situation has stabilised it is only because Iraqi Sunni and Shia now hate each other more than they hate the Americans. It is a terrible legacy of five years of war.

Messages to the people

20th March 2003 5.30 am: the American army and its allies bombard Baghdad.
The War in Iraq has started. The blood and ink flow in abundance. Five years
later, we, as writers, intellectuals and activists, are sending a message to
the people. We would like to appeal to each and every one of you and make
you think.?

You can use this as introduction, but it is not obligatory. We ask with
insistence however that you mention the title ‘Messages to the people’, as
well as the following sentences: ‘Messages to the people’ on the occasion of
the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, is an initiative of Het
Beschrijf, a Brussels based literary organisation and the BRussells
Tribunal, an academic activist think tank.

We would like to know which texts you will publish and when. Omissions are
only permitted with the permission of the author (via Het Beschrijf). Thank
you very much.

For more info: see:
www.passaporta.be - www.brusselstribunal.org

Best Wishes,

Piet Joostens, Brigitte Neervoort, Het Beschrijf

Lieven De Cauter, Dirk Adriaensens, BRussells Tribunal

The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/12/warcrimes.balkans

A Croatian general went into the dock at the war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague yesterday in a keenly awaited case that is effectively putting the Zagreb regime of the 1990s on trial for crimes against humanity in its war against the Serbs.

In what is arguably the most important trial staged at the tribunal since Slobodan Milosevic died in custody in The Hague two years ago, General Ante Gotovina faces nine counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The charges cover his command during the three-day blitz in August 1995 which drove the Serbs out of Croatia, cemented Croatian independence, and contributed hugely to the end of the war in neighbouring Bosnia a couple of months later.

More than six years after Gotovina was secretly indicted, and four years after he went on the run from international justice, the trial of the 52-year-old former French legionnaire will open a window on the murky and ugly politics of the Balkans in the 1990s, as well as on the roles of the CIA, MI6, and the Pentagon.

Apart from the two Bosnian Serb genocide suspects, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, Gotovina was the most sought suspect on the tribunal’s wanted list until he was handcuffed while eating a scampi supper in a Tenerife beach hotel 28 months ago. Gotovina had been sheltered by associates in the Croatian security services and underworld, foiling efforts to seize him masterminded by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. He was tracked down through a mobile phone call to Zagreb from Spain in 2005.

Gotovina is being tried with two other Croatian generals in what is the first big case to rule on Croatia’s conduct in the 1991-95 war with the Serbs. The former president, Franjo Tudjman, his defence minister, Gojko Susak, and two other senior officers would have been in the dock too had they not died.

The case turns on the contention that the Zagreb regime of the 1990s, under the authoritarian nationalist Tudjman, ran a systematic campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing to drive out its large Serbian minority. The campaign of August 1995 meant “the end for many Serbs of their lives on ancestral homelands”, said the prosecutor, Alan Tieger, opening the case against Gotovina and his two co-defendants, Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac.

All three defendants are pleading not guilty to the charges of murder, persecution and plunder.

Tieger said Tudjman dubbed the Serb minority “a cancer on the underbelly of Croatia”, and told Gotovina that the offensive would mean “the Serbs will, to all practical purposes, disappear”. The prosecutor said: “The Serb community was a scarred wasteland.”

For the Croats the 72-hour blitz, named Operation Storm, was well-planned military brilliance that routed the Serb forces. Gotovina was a key commander of the operation that led to the Croatian victory. The US was closely involved in it; the CIA used spy planes to expose Serbian plans.

The prosecution blames Gotovina for doing nothing to stop the murder of at least 150 civilians. “Gotovina planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of the deportation and forced displacement of the Serb population,” the indictment said. “These crimes included the unlawful killing of Serbs who did not flee, the burning and destruction of Serb villages, and the looting of property. The cumulative effect led to the large-scale displacement of an estimated 150,000-200,000 Serbs.”

Gotovina remains a hero to Croatian nationalists, who watched the trial live on TV in Croatia yesterday.

Before returning to Croatia as Yugoslavia collapsed, Gotovina had been in Africa as a French legionnaire, and had been convicted in France of robbery, kidnapping and extortion.

Hiyam Noir, March 2 2008

Palestine Free Voice

A Gaza Strip family,whom I consider to be the best of friends, in the large inner circle of Palestinian friends, lost their little daughter,Mariah last night.Mariah only eight years old, died before dawn, she died before the very exhausted Palestinian ambulance crew, the heroes in this war, reached the Kamal Edwan Hospital.The medics were unable to save the little girl Mariah, because of the congestion on the roads, and the many transports of seriously injured,victims of Israeli missile attacks in the northern parts of Gaza Strip.

For the fifth consequent day Gaza Strip residents is carrying burned and twisted body parts of their dead and their wounded relatives, their friends and their neighbors.In a rigid pathological, methodical manner, the Israelis are launching massive air strikes without stop, in the worst of hundreds of other massacres against our people.The Israelis are killing our people with all kinds of sophisticated high tech weaponry,paid for and delivered by Zionists lobbyists and senators in the US congress.

Today we are counting more then 109 Martyrs and more then 150 wounded, including many children, elderly women and men.In addition to the big destruction of dozens civilian homes, food shops,workshops,official buildings and institutions,the Israeli continue its criminal intent to completely erase the bread fields,Palestinian fertile agricultural land. While we fear Israeli threats of a genocidal finale ,will become reality before they complete these chapters of war crimes against our people in Gaza Gaza Strip, the serial killing continues.

On Sunday before dawn Israeli warplanes launched missiles slamming into the empty offices of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.No casualties are reported in this attack.The Israelis has continued its massive rades, that has killed close to 70 Palestinians in two days.The Palestinian death toll rose by 21 today, bringing the number of victims in these Israeli barbaric genocidal massacres, to 109,since the attacks over Gaza Strip erupted on Wednesday.Palestinian medical officials on Gaza Strip reveal that att least 54 Palestinians and two Israelis were killed on Saturday, the deadliest day in more than seven years.The Israelis onslaught on Gaza Strip has failed to protect the southern Israel, from Palestinian retaliation attacks.On Sunday more than 25 rockets were launched from Gaza Strip, at the southern parts of Ashkelon and the settlement of Sderot, three Israelis have been killed and nine were injured.

02:35am 02 03 2008
Israeli Apache helicopters launched two missile towards a wood shop, located in the southern Rafah City, belonging to the Abu Taha family,the missile attack caused a complete destruction.to the buildings and a complete personal disaster to the Al Taha family.

02:54am 02 03 2008
A few minutes later Israeli aircraft’s shelled a metal workshop in the Zaiton area in the eastern parts of Gaza City. The workshop belonged to the Felfel family.The two missile launched caused a huge destruction to the building and a complete personal disaster to the Felfel Family.

08:10am 02 03 2008
No sleep this night,still the Israelis bombing and burning the ground under the feet’s of our people. The child Safa’ Abu Seif 12, from the northern Jabaliya refuge camp was killed in the missiles attack, launched at the homes of citizens in the Jabalya refugee camp.

09:32am 02 03 2008
Wesam Fayez Abed Rabou 22 and Khaled Rayan 20 from Al Qassam Brigades were killed by the Israeli bombing of the refuge camp in Jabaliya.The torn, burnt and shattered parts of this two young Palestinian fighters, was carried away and taken to Kamal Edwan Hospital.

A few minutes ago, the medical crews and rescue teams ,found the bodies of two missing women.Ibtisam Atta Allah 25 and Raja’a Atta Allah 31, was found under the rubble of the destroyed home of the Atta Allah Family in Gaza City.This devastated family have lost many of their children and other family members, in the past five days of massive Israeli genocidal massacre on Gaza City.

13:50pm 02 03 2008
Yousif Abu Warda 50, died from the serious wounds he sustained yesterday.

13:55pm 02 03 2008
Israeli Apache helicopters launched two missiles towards a group of gathering people, nearby the Zemo area, a location in were the Israelis have focused its extensive continued shelling.One of the victims of this attack is Mahmoud Abu A’ita he was killed only 19 years old.

What was left of the teenager,Mahmod arrived to the Kamal Edwan Hospitalin plastic bags, his body was torn in apart, by the excessive force from the missile that struck his body.The residents must bury the dead as quickly as possible,because of the large number of dead, there are not enough refrigerators,for all to the corpses. There is also a big problem here, to find tools and material to dig and build all the graves.

18:40pm 02 03 2008
At this moment lots of Israeli Baldozers and huge number of Panzers were landed at Al-Da’our hill northern Biet-Lahia Baldozing the green fields.I am Writting this Report and the Israeli Appattchi is in low over Biet-Lahia and North of Gaza strip ..

22:00pm 02 03 2008

Na’em Abu El-Housni 48 and Ra’ed Jenied 30 was killed when Israeli aircrafts launched missiles at a group of people in the area of Al-Sika in the eastern parts of Jabaliya refuge camp. Again the
citizens are called in from load speakers to give blood to the wounded and badly injured on Gaza Strip. While writing this reports Israeli helicopters are still shooting to kill as many of us as possible with their heavy machine gun fire.

23:55pm 02 03 2008
Lo’ay Jamal Abed Rabou 20 and Muhamad Bahar 18 died after the serious injuries they suffered from the continued missile attacks on the eastern parts of Jabaliya refugee camp, near the Zemo area earlier this evening.

00:15am 03 03 2008
Israeli warplanes launched a missile at a carpentry workshop belonging to the Shabat family in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip. The massive missile attack left a complete destructionof the workshop and a devastated Shabat family.

01:05am 03 03 2008
The Israeli perpetrators shelled a metal workshop in Tal-El Za’atar, belonging to the Abu Ai’ta family, the workshop is completely destroyed. After a few minutes, the Apache helicopters returned to shell the metal workshop of the Badran family, also located in the Jabaliya refuge camp, the workshop is completely destroyed and the Badran family is in shock and devastated.

by Donald Macintyre

The Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, made it clear last night after Israeli ground forces withdrew from Gaza that a 48-hour incursion which claimed more than 100 Palestinian lives was not a “one-time event” and operations against Hamas would continue.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, who has broken off negotiations with Israel in protest at the offensive, yesterday offered to mediate a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. There was no immediate Israeli reaction to the offer.

But Mr Olmert, who says he still wants negotiations with Mr Abbas’s authority in Ramallah to continue, told the Knesset’s foreign affairs committee that continued military “weakening” of Hamas would strengthen the negotiating process by bolstering the moderate Palestinian leadership as well as curbing rocket fire.

Mr Olmert’s pledge to sustain military pressure on Hamas came as the Israeli human rights agency Btselem challenged military claims that the large majority of those killed in the operation were militants. It declared that at least 54 of 106 Palestinians killed ? including 25 minors ? did “not take part in the hostilities”.

As the Israeli forces withdrew, it began to emerge that there were fierce exchanges of fire between IDF troops and armed militants almost immediately after the former established positions in the Abed Rabbo district of this heavily populated town.

Although this is a largely Fatah area, some residents said that the “Murabitoun” ? a name often given in Gaza to Hamas-dominated militant groups in border zones - regularly functioned in the area only a mile away from Israel and fought for around 90 minutes here before pulling back as the Israeli forces continued their armoured advance under air cover on Saturday.

Ayman Abu Shbak, 30, described how he braved crossfire to cross the alley between his own house and the one opposite where his niece Jaqueline, 16, and his nephew Eyad, 14, lay terminally bleeding after being shot by Israeli forces in the family’s second-floor living room. Mr Abu Shbak said that at one end of the alley ? where two burnt-out cars and one badly damaged one were still parked yesterday ? troops had taken over a house while at the opposite junction there were about 10 armed militants.

He added: “Both sides were shooting. There was heavy fire from the resistance. He said that Eyad, who had been shot as he got up to go to the lavatory, was lying “in the lap of the girl who had gone to help him. I came down to the door and shouted at the resistance to stop firing.

“They said ?bring the children down and we will stop.’ I went back and picked up the boy ? I could feel he was still breathing ? and then I felt very tired. I lost my nerve.” After he argued again with the militants, he said, one of them eventually helped him and his brother Hatem bring the children down to the ground floor and 100 metres away, where they were eventually found by an ambulance. Mr Abu Shbak added: “I went with the boy in the ambulance to Kamal Odwan hospital. He was transferred to Shifa hospital and within an hour he died.”

There was still a trail of bloodstains yesterday down the stairs where the two young teenagers had been carried. Mr Abu Shbak was certain that the two teenagers had died from Israeli bullets and pointed to the two large holes in the window directly in the line of fire from the house which he and other witnesses said had been occupied by Israeli troops. Mr Abu Shbak was adamant that militants had at no time entered the house till the rescue attempt well after the children were shot, leaving the Israeli forces no justification for shooting any of its occupants.

It is a tragic irony of war that the Abu Shbak family have no reason to love Hamas. The two teenagers were living alone with their mother and another brother, Mohammed, 12. Their Fatah activist father, also named Mohammed, is in Ramallah having been forced to flee Gaza after Hamas’s enforced takeover of the Gaza Strip in June last year. As a result neither parent ? the mother was unable to move out of the immediate area because of the incursion ? was able to see the bodies of their children before they were buried.

The Abu Shbak family are cousins of Rashid Abu Shbak, the long-standing Fatah security chief in Gaza, and a close ally of Mohammed Dahlan ? seen as one of the Fatah leaders most favoured in the West. Hatem Abu Shbak, 32, himself a former officer in the Fatah-dominated Preventative Security, had little desire to talk internal politics yesterday. “We only want peace; peace with Israel and peace between the Palestinians.” Mr Abbas’s offer last night was one of the few ? albeit very slender ? hopes of achieving it.

Hamas boasted of a “victory” yesterday because of the ? probably very short- term ? Israeli withdrawal. But earlier at Kamal Odwan, the hospital director Bassem Abu Warda said: “Israel will not get rid of Hamas and Hamas will not get rid of Israel.”