Twelve Palestinians were executed by Palestinian gunmen...

Twelve Palestinians were executed by Palestinian gunmen who suspected them of collaborating with the Israelis.
Iyad Ab Ishab and Walid Radwan did not stand a chance. When their guards - fellow Palestinians - at the main jail in Qalqiliya heard that Israeli forces were about to enter the city in the early hours, Ishab, 20, and Radwan, 22, alleged collaborators, were bound, stood up against a wall and shot.
Their bodies were dumped in a side street as a gruesome warning to anyone else contemplating spying for Israel against their own people.
Confirming the death of the two men in Qalqilya, arrested more than a year ago, Palestinian security services said they had been "executed" by their guards.
In Bethlehem, the treatment meted out to Mahmood Rahamie, 21, was no less brutal. There, say witnesses, masked gunmen dragged the blindfolded and bound Rahamie through the streets in the early hours and shot him in a car park off Manger Square, site of the church where Christians believe Jesus was born. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, an offshoot of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the shooting.
"He was a very faithful informer" for the Israelis, said Mayor Hanna J. Nasser. Asked if the man had received a trial, Nasser replied, "He had a field trial."
The bodies of eight men were found early in the morning in a street in the West Bank town of Tulkarm. Witnesses said two masked gunmen had entered a Palestinian intelligence building where the men were being held, shot them and then dragged them outside.
The police and guards did not try to stop the gunmen, who also belonged to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, because they did not want to raise tensions in the city which is surrounded by Israeli tanks, the security sources said.
The 12th killing was reported from Beit Jala, a community near Bethlehem.
The day's slaughter was too much to be a coincidence. Instead, it was seen as a calculated warning within the Palestinian community as the Israelis ringed more towns and villages with steel