Gaza Missiles and Israeli Operations Continue

JERUSALEM — New York Times – Five Palestinian fighters were killed and an Israeli soldier was badly wounded Thursday in central Gaza, about a mile from the border with Israel, the Israeli Army and Palestinian medics said.

In the afternoon, Palestinian militants fired three rockets toward southern Israel. One hit about 40 yards from a school in downtown Sderot, and 12 students were treated for shock, the Israeli police said.

At least two other Israeli soldiers were slightly wounded Wednesday night, when the operation began, and about 20 Palestinians were wounded Thursday, including a Reuters television journalist and a 7-year-old boy. Another Palestinian fighter was critically wounded in the combat, which the Israeli Army described as a routine raid to suppress rocket and mortar fire into Israel.

The casualties occurred in a week when Israel has stepped up day-to-day operations against Palestinian militants, especially Islamic Jihad, which has fired most of the rockets from Gaza. The Israeli soldier was severely injured when the Palestinians fired an antitank rocket. A helicopter took him to a hospital in Beersheba, and his family was notified, the army said. An army news release said that seven Palestinian gunmen had been killed in the operation. But Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, director of emergency services in Gaza, said that only five had died.

Two of the dead were from the ruling Hamas faction and one from Islamic Jihad. The identity of the others was not clear. Three were killed in the morning and two more in the afternoon, Dr. Hassanein said. He said that the Israeli forces made Palestinian ambulances wait before retrieving the wounded. Operations early this week, from the air and the ground, killed at least eight fighters from Islamic Jihad and two from Hamas.

In Sderot, Elias Gabay, a school security guard, said that one class was outside when the siren went off warning of a rocket attack. He ran with the children to a concrete wall used as a shield to protect them from any shrapnel.

“Some of the children started to cry, and then there was a rush of parents, who came to the school to pick up their children,” Mr. Gabay told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. A day after Israel rejected another feeler for a truce from Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, an Israeli deputy prime minister, Haim Ramon, said that the idea was an indication that Israel’s policies, pairing military action with an economic blockade, were working in Gaza.

“The messages coming in all kinds of strange ways, all of these things are a kind of smoke screen that just shows that Israel’s recent policy toward Palestinian terror is bearing fruit,” Mr. Ramon told Army Radio.

The former national security adviser for Ariel Sharon, Giora Eiland, said in an interview that Israel should confront Hamas with a choice: a cease-fire and a political accommodation or a complete cutoff of supplies coupled with attacks on political as well as military targets.

Mr. Eiland argued that Israel should take advantage of the Hamas takeover of Gaza and its desire to be seen as responsible for what happens there. “Why not create the dilemma on Hamas’s side rather than on our side?” Mr. Eiland asked. “There’s a deal, an understanding to be had. But to choose it, Hamas must face a much worse alternative.”


By STEVEN ERLANGER


 

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