Just two days before an Israeli general election in which Ariel Sharon is campaigning on his militarist policies, Israeli forces yesterday launched their biggest raid on Gaza since the prime minister came to power two years ago.
The army killed 12 Palestinians and injured dozens more — eight critically — as about 50 tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopters swooped on the Zaitoun district of Gaza city, a Hamas stronghold.
Sharon’s cabinet yesterday also ordered the immediate closure of Palestinian cities and access to Israel from the occupied territories until after tomorrow’s ballot. The move prevents about four-million Palestinians from leaving the towns and villages in which they are resident, and from crossing the 1967 border. The army said curfews may also be imposed in some areas.
More than 100 buildings were flattened during the raid. The military claimed they were weapons workshops and that rockets and anti-tank missiles were seized. Palestinians said most were shops wrecked indiscriminately in the attack.
Hours later, a six year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by the Israeli army in another part of Gaza, the latest of more than 100 children killed by the army since the start of the intifada. His five year-old brother was wounded.
The military said the two were among a group that walked into a no-go area for Palestinians near an army post next to Rafa refugee camp, and the soldier who opened fire did not see the children.
Details of the incident remained sketchy several hours after the killing amid the continuing violence in Gaza.
The government claimed that the incursion was prompted by escalating ”terror attacks” ahead of the election.
The defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, said the army hit weapons factories in Gaza after Hamas fired 10 mortars on the Israeli town of Sderot on Friday.
”We must provide defence to the citizens of Israel,” he said. ”In the last few weeks and over the past weekend we have seen an increase in attempts by terror organisations, in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, to carry out attacks.”
He said the government has not ruled out the total reoccupation of Gaza.
”The option of taking control of the Gaza Strip has been weighed in the past and is still being considered,” he said.
But the Palestinians accused Sharon of launching the attack to bolster his re-election campaign.
Major General Abdel Razek Majaidie, the head of Palestinian security in Gaza said: ”There’s no doubt Sharon launched this raid to kill innocent civilians so he looks tough in the election. It’s a crime against innocent people.”
Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, a Hamas representative threatened a bloody retaliation. ”Our reaction will include mass death,” he said.
Israeli forces thrust deep into Gaza city, almost reaching Palestine square in the centre for the first time in years. The army said its troops came under sustained attack from Palestinians armed with automatic weapons and missiles after they were called to fight over mosque loudspeakers.
”Every man with a weapon must rush to the streets and defend Palestinian honour,” the call said.
Most, possibly all, of the dead were men in their late teens and twenties. Gaza City residents said most of them were armed fighters.
Israeli tanks also moved into Beit Hanoun, a town at the northern edge of the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces blew up four bridges on Saturday that they said had been used as launch pads for the attack on Sderot.
Hamas leaders said the raids were also intended to undermine talks in Cairo aimed at establishing a common Palestinian strategy toward Israel. Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement has been pressuring Hamas and Islamic Jihad to end suicide bombings and other attacks on Israeli civilians because they bring harsh reprisals and undermine the struggle for independence.
Egypt has proposed a one-year ceasefire within the 1967 borders but not against Israeli troops in the occupied territories.
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, yesterday said that a future Palestinian state must be contiguous and viable, not the patchwork of islands the Palestinians have theoretical control of today.
”A Palestinian state, when it’s created, must be a real state, not a phoney state that’s diced into a thousand different pieces,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
He also called on the Israelis to end the construction of settlements on the West Bank and to address the humanitarian crisis in the occupied territories, and on the Palestinians to ”clamp down on terrorism”, in order to establish a Palestinian state within three years.
The Arab League secretary-general, Amr Moussa, called Powell’s statement ”very, very positive” and a sign that the US was serious about a Palestinian state. – Guardian Unlimited Â