A Lockerbie-style explosion would probably be contained.Every El Al flight has at least one highly trained sky marshal, equipped to neutralise hijackers Jumbo jets have at least two. According to Aviation Week, some of the fleet were fitted with electronic counter-measures after a couple of German revolutionaries fired surface-to-air missiles at an El Al plane.Beyond that, the slightest threat detected by Israel’s far-flung security services is instantly passed on to the airline. At the airports, agents discreetly monitor all arrivals and departures. “There are,” as one informed traveller liked to put it, “many eyes.”.

The Israeli army shot dead five Palestinians yesterday, throwing down the gauntlet to the United States which has been calling for a Middle East ceasefire with increasing urgency to pave the way for its anti-terror coalition building. The Israeli army shot dead five Palestinians yesterday, throwing down the gauntlet to the United States which has been calling for a Middle East ceasefire with increasing urgency to pave the way for its anti-terror coalition building.
The killings threatened to make a mockery of an agreement confirmed only a day earlier at a long-awaited meeting between Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister, and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. It came after days of impatient pressure from Washington.Western diplomats were last night scrambling to keep an eight-day old ceasefire in place, and to ensure that a meeting between Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs goes ahead today. If cancelled, it will mean that the ceasefire that Washington has so desperately sought is at serious risk of dying in its infancy. Today is supposed to be the start of the countdown towards implenting the blueprint for a return to peace talks, the Mitchell report. But last night that was in doubt.The fractured truce, and efforts to return to negotiations, will come under more strain today as Palestinians take to the streets for the first anniversary of the start of the intifada. Planned mass marches could turn into violent confrontations.The applause from the United States had barely died away after Wednesday’s long-awaited ceasefire talks between Mr Peres and Mr Arafat – negotiations deemed crucial to America’s coalition-building – before the fighting and the funerals resumed.

The talks agreed to “maximum effort” to enforce a ceasefire.Yet in the early hours yesterday Israel dispatched tanks and bulldozers to destroy eight Palestinian houses in a refugee camp in Rafah, close to the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt. A long gun battle erupted which left three Palestinians dead and – according to Palestinian hospital officials – at least 27 wounded. Two others – one of them a 15-year-old boy – were later shot dead elsewhere in Gaza by troops.As the bodies of the dead were borne through the streets of an angry Gaza, crowds of mourners shouted for revenge. Activists from the Islamic militant parties – Hamas and Islamic Jihad – used loudspeakers to call on the crowd to ignore the Arafat–Peres agreement.The killings, which came as Israel closed down for the Jewish Yom Kippur day of fasting, raise questions over whether the Israeli military is supporting the truce moves being pushed mainly by Mr Peres. The army said the Rafah raid was intended to destroy Palestinian buildings along the border which were used for weapons smuggling..

Exploding shells twinkle over a hilltop in northern Afghanistan as opposition soldiers try to show that one day they will have the strength to overthrow the Taliban in Kabul. A line of soldiers advances on the enemy’s position and flushes out a single prisoner. Exploding shells twinkle over a hilltop in northern Afghanistan as opposition soldiers try to show that one day they will have the strength to overthrow the Taliban in Kabul. A line of soldiers advances on the enemy’s position and flushes out a single prisoner.
It was a perfectly efficient operation as a training exercise by the forces of the Northern Alliance, the opposition movement, which hopes one day to recapture the Afghan capital, Kabul, which it lost to the Taliban five years ago.But such set-piece assaults are unlikely to play a central role in any assault by the Northern Alliance as it tries to break out of its mountain fastnesses over the next few months. The transformation of the battlefield is more likely to come about because allies of the Taliban change sides.There is another possibility for the Northern Alliance. If the US launches a sustained air attack it might become impossible for the Taliban to concentrate its forces to meet an assault on the ground.If the Taliban did muster its forces, it would suffer heavy casualties, which it can ill afford, and total loss of equipment, as happened to the Iraqi army in the Gulf War of 1991.

But it is difficult to believe that the United States will give tactical air support to advancing Northern Alliance forces when the American public wants to see its own troops in action.Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister of the Northern Alliance, says its forces have launched “small-scale offensives in different parts of the country”. The idea is to make probing attacks to see if the Taliban is weakening. The Taliban, for their part, do not want to give anybody the impression that they are on the run.It would help the Northern Alliance immensely in terms of its international credibility if it could win a serious victory such as recapturing Mazar- I-Sharif, the largest city of northern Afghanistan. There are no eyewitness accounts of the fighting, but the Taliban claim to have recaptured the one city that the Northern Alliance said it had taken. The alliance, also known as the United Front, says it fought off a counter-attack.But the Northern Alliance has had one very important achievement over the last month.