Yesterday's bombing in Gaza has prompted uncharacteristic soul- searching among Israelis, reports David Horovitz
Several times in the past 22 months of intifada conflict, brief bouts of faint optimism about prospects for a stable ceasefire have been shattered by what Israel calls its "targeted strikes" against the men it alleges orchestrate suicide bombings.
Israel has always justified such strikes by arguing that it has an obligation to its citizens to eliminate the bombers and their dispatchers whenever intelligence information enables it to do so.
Yesterday, too, government politicians and military officials defended the overnight Gaza City F-16 strike which killed Salah Shehade, commander of the Hamas military wing, and 14 other Palestinians, most of them children.
While they regretted what they said was the unexpected civilian death toll, they said Shehade was a terrorist who had orchestrated hundreds of attacks and that the military had an obligation to target him when it had the opportunity.
Aides to the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, derided the notion that recent contacts with Palestinian Authority ministers, overseen on the Israeli side by the Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, might have led to an Intifada-quelling breakthrough and that the raid on Gaza City had quashed any such prospect.
They poured similar scorn on efforts by the Palestinian Interior Minister, Mr Abdel-Razak Yehiyeh, to reach an agreement with Hamas and other factions on an end to suicide bombings inside Israel.
However, in marked contrast to previous attacks on Hamas and other radical leaders, which have been backed with near-unanimity in Israel's multi-party unity government and widely supported by the public, the heavy loss of civilian life in the latest strike prompted Israeli soul-searching yesterday, even within the cabinet and the army, and some accusations that Mr Sharon had acted now precisely to torpedo faint hopes of negotiated progress.
The Bush administration, which has aligned itself so staunchly with Mr Sharon's government in recent weeks, issued the most damning of criticisms. The White House spokesman, Mr Ari Fleischer, said Israel had acted despite "knowing that innocents would be lost".
The army's operations chief, Mr Dan Harel, insisted that had military planners anticipated the widespread damage and the civilian death toll, the raid would not have been carried out.
The Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, claimed previous efforts to eliminate Shehade had been aborted half-a-dozen times because of concerns over civilian casualties. Just days ago, military officials said, two F-16s hovered over the very same building, with Shehade known to be inside, but were ordered to hold their fire.
Such protestations produced little sympathy, not only among Palestinian and international critics, but at home, too.
While no mainstream Israeli politicians queried the targeting of Shehade - who was seen as even more radical than Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, patron of the suicide bombers - the protests over a night-time raid on a residential neighbourhood ran across the political spectrum.
Mr Yossi Sarid, leader of Israel's main opposition party, the left-wing Meretz, called the strike "a kind of act of terror." Mr Benny Elon, a Knesset hardliner, asked why the neighbourhood had not been evacuated to prevent the civilian deaths.
Mr Yitzhak Levy, a government minister, complained at the absence of ministerial consultation.
Most significantly, Ms Dalia Rabin-Pelossof, daughter of the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, resigned as deputy minister of defence, a move she had been contemplating for some weeks because the Sharon government had offered the Palestinians no "political horizon" and was failing to uphold her father's peace-making legacy.
Israel is now bracing for a new round of suicide bombings. A defiant Mr Sharon indicated to his cabinet yesterday that he would continue to lead an uncompromising fight against the bombers and to ensure that Israel was victorious in the battle against terrorism.
If few Israelis would dispute Mr Sharon's assertion that Shehade's elimination marked a "great success", the manner in which it was carried out would appear to represent a heavy defeat for Israel - alienating even such supporters as the United States, dashing faint hopes of a productive dialogue with the Palestinians and creating bitter, fertile ground for more suicide bombers.
A fatal blow, too, therefore, for any prospects of a speedy way out of this conflict.