2002 - Israel destroyed a Palestinian security compound in an air strike and tightened a ring of armour around President Yasser Arafat after a Palestinian shot dead six people at a Jewish birthday party. Israel’s retaliatory raid in the West Bank city of Tulkarem killed one policeman and injured 40 people. The troops shot dead another Palestinian during a stone-throwing clash near Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah in the West Bank. The new cycle of death and retribution pushed both sides deeper into a conflict that US and European truce efforts have sometimes calmed but never quelled. Israeli F-16 warplanes fired missiles at the main security headquarters in Tulkarem, reducing the building to rubble. The Israeli army said the air raid was a response to the shooting rampage in the northern Israeli city of Hadera.
Other important events
1778 - English navigator Captain James Cook discovers the Hawaiian Islands.
1896 - The X-ray machine is exhibited for the first time.
1911 - The first landing of an aircraft on a ship takes place as pilot Eugene B. Ely flies on to the deck of the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco harbour.
1960 - The US and Japan sign a joint defence treaty.
1968 - The US and the Soviet Union agree on draft treaty to control nuclear weapons.
1974 - Egypt and Israel sign the Sinai Separation of Forces Agreement.
1977 - Australia’s worst rail crash, at Granville, Sydney, kills 83.
1984 - President of the American University of Beirut, Dr Malcolm Kerr, is gunned down outside his office in Lebanon.
1990 - Washington Mayor Marion Barry is held for cocaine.
1992 - More than 100,000 people attend Kenya’s first legal anti-government rally in 22 years.
1997 - Norwegian explorer Borge Ousland becomes the first person to walk across Antarctica alone and unaided.
1998 - Senior Iraqi diplomat Hekmat Al Hejju is stabbed to death in Amman, Jordan.
2000 - Helmut Kohl resigns as honorary chairman of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union.
2001 - At least five people are killed and up to 26 injured when a coach carrying pilgrims crashes on the Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway.
2002 - The Sierra Leone government declares the country’s 11-year-old civil war over.
2005 - The world’s largest commercial jet, the Airbus A380, is unveiled in Toulouse, France.
2007 - A fire engulfs a high-rise building Fortune Tower under construction off Shaikh Zayed Road, Dubai, killing four workers.
2008 - Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius, dies at the age of 64.
2009 - Israeli troops begin to withdraw from Gaza.
2012 - Kodak files for bankruptcy protection, becoming the most storied casualty of the digital age.
2013 - Former cycling champion Lance Armstrong admits that he had used performance-enhancing drugs and lied about it.
2014 - Iranian diplomat Ali Asghar Assadi is killed in a drive-by shooting in Sana’a, Yemen.
