WASHINGTON (MEMO) – The rising violence in the occupied West Bank and Al-Quds has been compared to the Second Intifada by CIA Director William Burns following his recent visit to the region.
“I was a senior U.S. diplomat 20 years ago during the Second Intifada, and I’m concerned — as are my colleagues in the intelligence community — that a lot of what we’re seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance to some of those realities that we saw then too,” Burns said last week in an interview at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Washington.
The Second Intifada began on 28 September 2000, when the then Zionist opposition leader Ariel Sharon entered Al-Aqsa Mosque with a heavily armed contingent of Zionist troops. The incursion provoked a strong Palestinian response. The subsequent uprising lasted five years and left over 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis dead.
“The conversations I’ve had with Israeli and Palestinian leaders left me quite concerned about the prospects for even greater fragility and even greater violence between Israelis and Palestinians,” added Burns.
The CIA director’s comments were made amid mounting tension across the occupied Palestinian territories following a Zionist military aggression in the West Bank city of Jenin last week during which ten Palestinians were killed, including a 67-year-old woman. Seven Zionists were later killed in a retaliatory shooting attack in occupied East Al-Quds.
Moreover, Zionist troops killed five Palestinian men and wounded six others on Sunday night during a raid on Ariha in the east of the occupied West Bank and another Palestinian teen on Monday.