Israel stepped up its pursuit of Hamas yesterday by sending dozens of tanks and attack helicopters deep into Gaza to destroy alleged weapons factories.
At least 11 people were killed during about six hours of fighting in pitch darkness after the Israeli army cut power to Gaza City and launched the raid in retaliation for the deaths of four soldiers killed when Hamas blew up an Israeli tank on Saturday.
The army said all the dead in yesterday’s assault were armed men. Palestinians said at least three were civilians crushed to death when Israeli soldiers blew up a building. A suicide bomber ran at a tank but was blown up when he was hit by Israeli gunfire. There were no army casualties.
The spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, visited the scene and threatened retaliation.
”The Israeli enemy has lost its mind. It acts like a runaway bull destroying houses on the heads of their owners,” he said. ”The enemy will pay the price for its crimes and will never escape punishment. Our people are capable of resisting.”
Hamas responded hours later by launching four rudimentary rockets into a neighbouring Jewish settlement, injuring three people.
After a huge mine destroyed the Israeli tank at the weekend, the defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, vowed to ”hit Hamas hard”. Since then, Israel has killed at least eight members of Hamas’s military wing.
On Monday, an Israeli undercover unit hiding in a vegetable van shot Riad Abu Zeid, the head of the military wing in the Gaza Strip. The elaborate operation to snatch him suggests Israel would have preferred to take him alive and interrogate him about his control of Hamas communications with cells in the West Bank.
A day earlier, six Hamas activists in Gaza were blown up while testing a small pilotless aircraft they apparently intended to use as a flying bomb or for surveillance. Palestinian officials believe the Israelis supplied the drone through intermediaries and detonated it once they were sure it was in the hands of Hamas. The Israeli military declined to confirm or deny the claim.
Israeli analysts say the six men blown up by the drone included Nidal Farahat, who oversaw Hamas’s manufacture of homemade rockets launched against Jewish settlements.
Hamas called the explosion ”the most serious assassination operation against the Iza Din al Kassam military wing since the liquidation of Salah Shehadeh, the head of the military wing” in July.
In response to the killings, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a senior Hamas leader in Gaza, demanded that Yasser Arafat call off Palestinian Authority meetings with Israel to discuss a ceasefire.
He also said that Israel’s ”army of occupation and its war minister, Shaul Mofaz will pay a heavy price”.
But Arafat and the Israeli government would appear to have a common interest in curbing Hamas. The organisation is rapidly becoming the favoured alternative to the Palestinian Authority in large parts of Gaza, particularly in the southern refugee camps.
Arafat’s Fatah movement has been urging Hamas to sign up to a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian ceasefire at talks in Egypt. The head of Egypt’s intelligence service, Omar Suleiman, has for several weeks convened meetings in Cairo between the various Palestinian factions, but Hamas remains defiant.
When Muhammad Deif, the former Hamas commander in Gaza, came out of hiding to attend the funerals of slain fighters, he told a French television station that there would be no ceasefire.
”We say it loudly: no negotiations with the Israeli side. No negotiations with America. No negotiations with those who recognise our enemy,” he said.
The Israeli reoccupation of most of the West Bank last spring, with its ”targeted assassinations”, mass arrests and wholesale destruction, proved a major blow to the Hamas infrastructure there. But the Israelis have had a more difficult time trying to crack Hamas in Gaza, in part because support for the organisation is so much more entrenched there and because, without returning to full occupation, the army has only limited control.
Hamas accuses Israel of laying the ground for reoccupation. Rantisi said that if such a reoccupation took place, Gaza would become ”a graveyard for the corpses of the Zionist enemy”.
Yoram Schweitzer, an analyst at the Jaffe centre for strategic studies in Israel, said he doubted the Israeli assaults on Gaza would deter further Hamas attacks.
”I don’t think it will have that much of an effect. Hamas want to prove that Israel is vulnerable too, either through rocket attacks or suicide attacks. The whole terror thing is about scoring points not decisive victories,” he said.
”When you have funerals and many casualties, some by accident and some by the intention of Israel, its main impact is on negotiations or a lack of them.”
· A Welsh woman accused the Israeli army of deliberately shooting her in the leg yesterday during a military operation in the West Bank city of Nablus in which at least two Palestinians were killed.
Anne Gwynne, a 65-year-old medical volunteer, said she was travelling on foot with a Palestinian medical worker to help a woman in labour when they were confronted by an army patrol.
”We asked the Israeli soldiers if we could pass. They didn’t reply, they simply shot. It was deliberate,” she said. ”The Israelis will say this is an accident, but no it wasn’t.”
Gwynne’s colleague was hit in the hand. – Guardian Unlimited Â