On the morning of April 23, three Palestinian men were dragged out of their beds, gags in their mouths and hands tied behind their backs. They were then pushed and shoved to Salam Street, where as a mob of their fellow Arabs cheered and jeered as they were shot dead for the alleged crime of cooperating with Israel.

Seven masked gunmen wearing the headbands of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, one of the branches of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement that specializes in suicide bombings, served as judge, jury and executioners.

'The fate of anyone giving the smallest scrap of knowledge to the Jew will be like this. Even telling a Jew the name of the street on which you stand is betrayal of the people,' one of the hooded gunmen told the crowd at the execution scene, according to eyewitnesses. 'And traitors can only be liquidated.'

The implications for those moderate Palestinians that would speak negatively of Arafat's regime or positively of visions of true peace with Israel are dire. The Palestinian Authority exerts tight control over its media and schools and the rhetoric shared by both those channels speaks volumes of the obstacles to peace in the region. On April 12, the Friday night sermon on official Palestinian Authority Television offered the following vision:

"We are convinced of the [future] victory of Allah; we believe that one of these days, we will enter Jerusalem as conquerors, enter Jaffa as conquerors, enter Haifa as conquerors, ..and all of Palestine as conquerors, as Allah has decreed…Anyone who does not attain martyrdom in these days should wake in the middle of the night and say: 'My God, why have you deprived me of martyrdom for your sake?…The Jews await the false Jewish messiah, while we await, with Allah's help… the Mahdi and Jesus, peace be upon him...Jesus's pure hands will murder the false Jewish messiah. Where? In the city of Lod, in Palestine…A reliable Hadith [tradition] says: 'The Jews will fight you, but you will be set to rule over them.' ..Allah… Until the Jew hides behind the rock and the tree. But the rock and tree will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, a Jew hides behind me, come and kill him.'"

The execution of the three occurred just hours after an Israeli helicopter swooped over the rooftops and fired missiles at a car speeding down Salam Street. Killed in the attack was the Hebron commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Marwan Zaloum, wanted by Israel for his responsibility for several terrorist acts, and his bodyguard.

The masked executioners claimed the three men had aided Israeli intelligence with information on Zaloum's exact moves.

Pinpoint strikes such as the one against Zaloum are the latest phase in Israel's onslaught against terror that began March 29, when armoured and infantry units stormed into the West Bank after a deadly wave of suicide bombings carried out by Al Aqsa and the militant Muslim groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers have pulled back from most Palestinian centers. Now Israeli commando teams and Apache gunships in the West Bank are targeting with stealth and speed individuals or very specific locations.

'We have wrecked the strongholds and many of the weapons labs, and now we are moving to highly localized strikes on dangerous individuals,' said an Israeli intelligence officer. 'Such war requires absolutely accurate and real-time information.'

Palestinian death squads have shot six men in Hebron and Ramallah within the past several days, killing four of them, in response to Israeli raids. During the heavy fighting of the first three weeks of April, militants summarily executed dozens of suspected informants, some just for having business dealings with Israelis.

While many Palestinians appear to regard the bloody reprisals as fitting punishment for collusion, the arbitrary executions frightened others. 'These boys they killed, [the militiamen] they did it just on suspicion,' said a Hebron merchant who observed the executions. 'Maybe these boys informed for Israel. No one knows their story. But dragging them into the street and killing them like that - this is uncivilized. This is not what our struggle should be about.'

On April 22, in a particularly brutal display of vigilante justice, Al Aqsa militiamen gathered three suspected informants in a downtown square in Ramallah and shot them in a manner seemingly intended to cause slow and painful death.

Bystanders spat on them and kicked the screaming men writhing on the street in pools of their own blood, while ambulances attempting to reach the scene were blocked by the gunmen. One of the men died, and two others were eventually brought to a Ramallah hospital, where they are in critical condition.

In Bethlehem, three Armenian Orthodox clerics held hostage in the Church of the Nativity were rescued by the Israeli Army. The priests had climbed onto a roof inside the compound and waved a sign to soldiers that said, "Save us."

Troops managed to get the three out of the compound. The monks told soldiers that Palestinian gunmen in the compound had beaten some of them last night, desecrated crosses and stolen gold artifacts.

The Christian populations of the Palestinian Authority has dropped from 15 per cent of the Arab population in 1950 to barely 2 percent today. Bethlehem and Nazareth, both of which had been Christian towns, today have strong Muslim majorities. Three quarters of Bethlehem Christians now live abroad.

This is due in large part to pressure from radical Islam: the Palestinian Authority has adopted Islam as its official religion, used shari'a Islamic codes, and officially appointed clerics brand Christians (and Jews) as infidels in their mosques.