Israel launched its first ground raid into Palestinian-ruled areas since the outbreak of the six-month-old intifada uprising, sending infantry, tanks and bulldozers into a Gaza refugee camp in the early hours of yesterday morning and demolishing or damaging about 30 homes from where it said mortar shells had been fired at Jewish settlements.
Two Palestinians were killed and another 27 injured during the night-time invasion.
The Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, insisted that the three-hour operation was "a clear act of defence" and that the order given to the army was "to go in and destroy the same posts from which our communities were shelled". Israeli officials said that more than 50 mortar shells had been fired by Palestinians on settlements inside Gaza, as well as communities inside Israel proper, in recent days.
Palestinian leaders accused Israel of having crossed a red line and they called for international intervention in the form of a UN force to protect Palestinians from Israeli aggression.
Mr Nabil Abu Rudeineh, an adviser to the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, said that the attack, ordered by the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, would not only generate "panic and tension" between Palestinians and Israelis, but in the entire region. The UN special Middle East envoy, Mr Terje Roed-Larsen, warned that the violence was "threatening to spin out of control".
In an interview in the daily Ha'aretz newspaper to be published today, Mr Sharon seemed to indicate that the raid was part of a broader plan: "The goal of the plan," he said, "is to place the terrorists in varying situations every day and to `unbalance' them so that they will be busy protecting themselves. In this government we do not threaten, we act."
Israeli officials insisted that the buildings destroyed in the raid had been abandoned in the early months of the uprising and were being used by Palestinian gunmen to fire on Jewish settlements. The Palestinians, however, countered that the 30 structures damaged or destroyed had left hundreds homeless.
