Nov 23, 2002

The incident on Friday evening, Nov. 15, in Hebron, during which 12 Israelis and three Palestinians got killed and 14 wounded, is a further sharp escalation of the mutual retaliation-for-retaliation-for-retaliation cycle of violence which is ripping Israeli and Palestinian communities apart.

The threat of war with Iraq brought protests from both sides of the Atlantic last week as a contingent of women announced their intention to conduct a four-month, 24-hour-a-day vigil near the White House, major religious organizations urged a peaceful resolution to the Iraq crisis, and the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) threatened legal action to prevent its government from attacking Iraq without explicit United Nations approval.