The army said were en route to a planned attack on Israelis

The army said were en route to a planned attack on Israelis.
The army banned journalists from al-Haruz neighbourhood, the scene of yesterday’s clash. Israeli soldiers shot dead three Palestinians in Hebron yesterday which is likely to lead to retaliation by Hamas, the organisation of Islamic militants to which they belonged. Their white Subaru car was riddled with bullets fired by an undercover squad of the border police All three were on Israel’s wanted list, Israeli radio said. Colonel Sankoh has 10 expatriate hostages, six of them Britons.The government has shown readiness to take part in internationally mediated peace talks but the RUF has refused to negotiate until all foreign troops are withdrawn. In the meantime, the rebels are expected to tighten their grip around Freetown..

Having served a long prison term for an attempted coup, he re-emerged to oppose the regime of Major-General Joseph Momoh, president from 1986 to1992.The RUF was launched in 1991, backed by Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia and has waged a Taylor-style campaign: terrorising communities, looting supplies and disrupting economic life. No one knows how many fighters the RUF has or how many other insurgent groups may be active alongside the main rebel movement. At the RUF’s head is the shadowy, enigmatic Colonel Foday Sankoh, whose base lies somewhere in the steamy eastern forests.To diplomats and aid agency workers whom he contacts by radio, he is little more than a disembodied, crackly voice.The colonel is believed to have trained in the Royal West African Forces before Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961. Western “security consultants” occupy the capital’s one remaining smart hotel.Yet the enemy seems almost as insubstantial as the muggy haze that has descended with the approach of the rainy season. Its leader, Captain Valentine Strasser, who came to power in 1992 with a pledge to finish off the enemy, claims three- quarters of the national budget is being spent on the war.Backed by Guinean and Nigerian troops, the government has drafted in Ukrainian pilots to fly its Soviet-era helicopter gunships and demobilised Gurkhas to train the army in guerrilla and jungle warfare.

In Waterloo, outside Freetown, the roadside is thronged with refugees who have fled a nearby camp in panic.The military government, the National Provisional Ruling council (NPRC), has increased the army to about 13,000 troops but seems powerless to contain the rebel advance. There are now more than a million inhabitants in this once sleepy town which, with its rickety wooden-frame houses and ubiquitous reggae music, belongs as much to the Caribbean as to the humid, sweltering climes of West Africa. Surrounding districts with their proudly British names – Hastings, Leicester, Gloucester – are filling up with the displaced. Troops guarding that village and its few remaining inhabitants say the enemy is in the bush, a short distance away.It is feared the airport at Lungi, separated from the Freetown peninsula by a wide lagoon, could soon be a target.All main towns are in government hands but the hinterland is at the mercy of the RUF, its roads unsafe. Mineral production, which accounted for two-thirds of foreign earnings, has been paralysed by rebel actions and agricultural exports halted. The only diamonds being produced are smuggled out of the country by soldiers and dealers.Freetown, founded by British philanthropists as a colony to resettle black slaves late in the eighteenth century, has swollen with the influx of terrified people from the interior. After the Songo raid, they attacked Newton, 24 miles from the capital.