Certainly, Booomerang, a new book by two prominent Israeli journalists, Ofer Shelah and Raviv Druker, reports that at a conference of officers as early as May 2001, Shaul Mofaz, now the Defence Minister but then Chief of Staff, asked for the tape to be switched off before telling them that he wanted a “price” exacted from the Palestinians of 10 killed a day on each of the Army’s seven fronts.And after six Israeli soldiers were killed in Ein Arik in February 2002, the book says, Mr Mofaz personally ordered a revenge operation in which for the first time Palestinian police officers would be shot, whether they posed a threat or not. But the Israeli human rights agency B’tselem estimates that some 1,700 Palestinian civilians have also been killed in the same period – a figure which many of these disturbing testimonies go some way to explaining.Breaking the Silence contends that the inspiration for many orders, which it says directly violate the international legal obligations of an occupying power, came from the highest ranks. There’s no need to add that they hit innocent people, and sometimes afterwards we saw .. ambulances arriving there. Nobody cared that they were liable to hit innocent people, they found the whole thing funny.”So far the testimonies gathered by Breaking the Silence have triggered 17 official Israel Defence Force investigations and one internal disciplinary process. But he tells how his attitude gradually changed when he came into contact with Palestinians and Bedouin for the first time and saw the long delays, and sometimes harassment, faced by them at the checkpoints he manned in the Jordan valley.

The ex-soldier, who joined the religious Nahal brigade despite having already shed his own ultra-orthodox background, talks about “initiated action” he saw when serving at the military base at the Psagot settlement on the edge of Ramallah in early 2002, and to which he says officers sometimes turned a blind eye.Instead of carrying out the instructions to use their machine guns and M16s only when fired at by Palestinians militants, he suggests, “a soldier would say: ‘Why let them decide when the shooting takes place? Let’s show them who’s boss.’”With time, he says, “the soldiers got the feeling that they were at a firing range, and for every shot fired .. they’d fire hundreds of bullets in return. Like most of the other 300 ex-soldiers who have so far testified about their experiences to Breaking the Silence, an organisation formed a year ago by a group of young men who had done their military service in Hebron, the soldier doesn’t want to give his real name.

As Israel sealed off the Gaza Strip and the West Bank ­ halting the flow of a few thousand Gazans allowed to work in Israel ­ thousands of people chanting slogans of revenge marched in the Jabalya camp, at the funerals of those killed in the explosion on Friday night. At least four militant gunmen were thought to have been among the dead.. Still dressed in the loose sharwal trousers that he wears for his work as a gardener, the 22-year-old ex-soldier sits across the caf?able in a central Tel Aviv shopping mall, and says that when he joined the Israeli army he just “wanted to kill Arabs”. The claim was vigorously dismissed by the army yesterday as a mere pretext for Hamas to launch its own rocket attacks. Although the first dozen rockets were fired on Friday by Islamic Jihad in response to the shooting dead of three of its activists in the West Bank City of Tulkarum, Hamas said the further spate was retaliation for what it continued to insist was an Israeli missile attack on Jabalya. The sharp increase in tension followed both the rocket attacks and an explosion at a military rally staged by Hamas which killed at least 15 people in the Jabalya camp on Friday evening. Both the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah Central committee have indicated they believe the explosion was caused by the detonation of weapons paraded by the faction.

A fourth and later missile was launched at a field near the northern Gaza community of Beit Hanoun where rocket attacks had been launched, according to the IDF. Although the IDF has on occasions used naval cannon to fire on the Gaza shore during the past five years of conflict, the use of land-based artillery would be unusual, if not unprecedented. News agencies reported five artillery pieces being set up near Kibbutz Nahal Oz close to the Gaza border. The air strikes targeted what the IDF said were three Hamas weapons facilities, a weapons warehouse in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza and a weapons factory and another weapons warehouse in Gaza City. Palestinian medics said that at least two of the four men killed had been Hamas militants. An Israeli aircraft also attacked a school in a crowded Gaza City neighbourhood, wounding at least 15 people.

The blast early this morning struck the Arkam school, which was established by the late founder of the militant Hamas group, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. The army said the building was used by a Hamas-linked foundation to raise money for terrorist attacks As Ariel Sharon summoned a meeting of his security cabinet for last night, the Israel Defence Forces said the Palestinian Authority had been ” tasked” with curbing the attacks, but the army stood ready to take whatever steps were ordered to “protect Israeli citizens.” The air strikes on Hamas targets came as the Defence Minister, Shaul Mofaz, said there would be a “crushing and unequivocal” response to at least 26 rockets fired from Gaza, mainly in the area of the Israeli border town of Sderot, in the previous 24 hours.

The army stepped up its military response to a spate of Palestinian-launched Qassam rocket attacks with a missile strike on two cars in Gaza City. Israel yesterday moved ground and artillery forces to the Gaza border after launching the first air strikes ­ one of which killed four people ­ since it withdrew the military from inside the strip two weeks ago. But with no American competitive entries this year, the festival was heavy on independent films and co-productions from Europe and Latin America, including A Cock and Bull Story, directed by Britain’s Michael Winterbottom, and Tideland, from the former Monty Python member, Terry Gilliam.The highlight of this year’s 53rd San Sebastian festival was a tribute to the late US filmmaker Robert Wise, who directed the classic 1960s musicals West Side Story and The Sound of Music He died of heart failure a day before the festival opened.. The female lead, Ana Geislerova, was also judged best actress.
Woody Allen’s latest, Match Point, unusually set in London rather than Manhattan, was well-received. Critics and writers said it was among several films more deserving of the top prize than Something Like Happiness, the winning Czech entry, directed by Bohdan Slama. This drew tepid applause and some boos when the decision was announced.