ISRAEL: Some 100 Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles were headed back toward the Jabalya area in the northern Gaza Strip last night, after having left the refugee camp at daybreak yesterday morning following a raid in which 11 Palestinians were killed, eight of them in disputed circumstances, writes Peter Hirschberg, in Jerusalem.
The forces were said to be capturing territory in a bid to foil the firing of Qassam rockets from the Strip into Israel. During the evening, militants fired two rudimentary, Hamas-produced rockets at the southern Israeli town of Sderot, from the Jabalya area. There were no injuries. It was not immediately clear last night how long the Israeli forces planned to stay in the Strip.
The early-morning raid in Jabalya yesterday came less than 12 hours after a suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus in the northern Israeli town of Haifa on Wednesday, killing 15 people.
Three Palestinians were also killed in the West Bank yesterday. Witnesses said eight Jabalya residents died when a tank fired a shell at a crowd of people trying to put out a blaze in a shop that had caught fire.
Doctors said the dead included five teenagers and a 40-year-old firefighter. "From the direction of the tank, I saw a projectile flying past," said one local resident.
An Israeli brigade commander, identified only as Moshe, insisted however that the Palestinians had died after a bomb, which militants were apparently planning for use against soldiers, went off inside the shop. He said a tank shell had been fired, but a short while after the blast in the shop, and at a man standing in an alleyway near the shop who was aiming a rocket-propelled grenade at troops.
Over 110 Palestinians were also injured in the raid which began shortly after midnight Wednesday, when dozens of tanks backed by attack helicopters, thrust into the densely populated camp, sparking fierce firefights, with local gunmen trying to resist the invading troops with assault rifles and grenades.
Two gunmen and a muezzin from a local mosque were killed in the initial fighting. The army, which has been targeting Hamas strongholds in the Strip in recent weeks, also destroyed three homes in Jabalya, one of them belonging to a senior Hamas activist, Abd el-Karim Ziada.
In the wake of the Haifa suicide attack, the Israeli government imposed a closure on the West Bank, barring Palestinians from entering Israel to work. Most of the 15 dead in the bombing were teenagers.
The US, which has tended to criticise the Palestinians for the ongoing violence, yesterday expressed concern over the death of civilians in Gaza. White House spokesman Mr Ari Fleischer said "the president reminds Israel about [his view that] any actions they take must be done with an eye toward protecting innocent Palestinians." In the West Bank, a 55-year-old mother of eight was shot dead near Jenin, apparently after gunmen had fired at an Israeli jeep and soldiers returned fire. A boy aged 16 was shot dead in Nablus, apparently after troops fired at stonethrowers, and an Islamic Jihad militant died in a shoot-out with troops in Bethlehem.
President Yasser Arafat has asked senior Palestine Liberation Organisation official Mahmoud Abbas to be the Palestinian Authority's prime minister.