ISRAEL: Hundreds of Israeli soldiers were searching house-to-house in Gaza into the night for the body parts of six colleagues who were killed yesterday morning when their armoured personnel carrier was blown apart in Gaza City's Zeitoun neighbourhood.
The Israeli death toll was the heaviest in the Gaza Strip for 18 months, and came amid fighting that also saw seven Palestinians killed, one of whom was a local Hamas commander and all of whom were reported to have been armed. Another Palestinian was killed in a subsequent Israeli missile strike.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for ambushing the Israeli army vehicle, said it was holding body parts and would issue terms - including demands for the release of security prisoners held by Israel - for their handover "to the Zionist occupier".
Israeli military sources said they would not negotiate with either group, but Red Cross officials were last night engaged in contacts with both sides.
The Israeli and Palestinian fatalities came during an overnight raid by Israeli troops on two factories in the crowded residential area producing Qassam rockets, which are frequently fired by Hamas at Jewish settlements in Gaza and across the border into Israel.
The Israeli army's Gaza-area commander, Gen Dan Harel, said the troops had destroyed the weapons factories and were heading out of the Strip when the armoured personnel carrier was hit. It ran over a mine and was blown apart - exploding into an orange ball of fire, and sending body parts flying hundreds of yards - because it was carrying more than 100 kg of explosives, the residue of the material used to blow up the weapons factories.
The attack exemplified the growing "Lebanonization" of Gaza, with Hamas and its partners replicating the tactics employed in south Lebanon by Hizbullah, which ultimately forced out the Israeli army four years ago. Such tactics include the remote-controlled detonation of explosives buried under the tarmac on roads used by Israeli troops.
Masked Hamas gunmen brandished parts of the destroyed vehicle, and a bloodied sack which contained soldiers' remains, for the benefit of camera crews.
Gen Harel said further footage he had seen - featuring parts of the dead soldiers' bodies - "turned my stomach" and showed that Israel was confronting an enemy that had "lost its humanity".
The Palestinian Authority, which condemned Israel for the initial raid into Gaza, barred Palestinian TV stations from showing some footage and urged other Arab stations to halt its broadcast.
Far-right Israeli politicians said that Israel should now "take the gloves off" and mount a far heavier military operation in Gaza. "We should give them one hour to return the bodies," said Mr Aryeh Eldad, of the far-right National Union party. If there was no response, Mr Eldad went on, any Palestinian carrying weaponry should be targeted, as should the funerals of Hamas and other gunmen.
In contrast, Mr Ephraim Sneh, a leading member of the opposition Labour Party, said the deaths underlined the urgent need for Israel to withdraw fully from the Gaza Strip - where some 7,800 Jewish settlers live among 1.3 million Palestinians. The pull-out should not be unilateral, as Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon advocates, said Mr Sneh, but rather should be co-ordinated with Palestinian officials.
Mr Sharon, whose Likud party last week voted down his plan for a unilateral disengagement from Gaza, told the Knesset that Israel was "fighting a cruel, inhuman enemy".