Palestinian fighters killed five Israeli soldiers on Wednesday by blowing up an armoured vehicle in a Gaza refugee camp as troops fought house-to-house in a Gaza City neighbourhood to search for the body parts of six soldiers killed in a similar attack on Tuesday.
The army confirmed last night that four soldiers and an officer had died in the attack next to the Rafah refugee camp.
Early on Thursday morning, an Israeli helicopter attacked the camp, killing at least seven people. Palestinian officials said all casualties were civilians.
Earlier, Israeli helicopters had been swiftly dispatched to try to prevent the remnants of the dead soldiers being removed, but an Islamic Jihad spokesperson had telephoned a Gaza radio station to say the organisation was in possession of some human remains. Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles also raided the camp.
In Gaza City the army killed at least five Palestinians and wounded dozens more, many of them civilians, as it searched the Zeitoun neighbourhood for the remains of the six Israelis killed on Tuesday, including the head of one which had been displayed in a video recording.
The Israeli defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, vowed swift revenge. ”Anyone who desecrates the bodies of soldiers, we shall catch them, and our settling of accounts with them will be bitter and precise,” he told Israeli television.
Later the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Islamic Jihad issued a statement saying they had handed over the soldiers’ remains to Egyptian mediators. At a conference in Gaza City, a masked spokesperson for al-Aqsa read out the statement saying: ”We have delivered the body parts to the Egyptian intelligence service in the presence of an official from the Palestinian Authority.”
He said the deal had been conditional on Israeli troops withdrawing from the Zeitoun district, which took place about an hour before the statement was issued. The militants had also given the Egyptians a list of ”our dear martyrs whose bodies are being held by the Israeli enemy” but did not specify whether the deal included the release of the Palestinian remains.
Israel had earlier insisted there would be no negotiations with Palestinian groups for the return of the remains, with the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, saying the troops would not leave until every remnant of the dead soldiers had been recovered.
But the authorities began talks with foreign mediators, led by the International Red Cross and Egyptian diplomats, in an attempt to break the deadlock. It had been thought that the killings near Rafah might have damaged the negotiations. The attack appears to have been a well-planned ambush which lured the soldiers to their deaths.
Fighters first hit an army bulldozer used to destroy Palestinian housing — ostensibly in search of weapon-smuggling tunnels — as it worked close to the Egyptian border. An armoured personnel carrier with a small contingent of troops was dispatched to rescue the bulldozer crew and was blown up, resulting in the deaths.
Islamic Jihad said in a statement the attack had been carried out in revenge for Israel’s assassination of the Hamas spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Marwan Queshta (19) a mechanic, was in his shop in Rafah during the attack. ”I heard a big explosion and it broke house windows all around me,” he said. ”Then clods of earth and fragments of human flesh and clothing started falling all around me.”
He added: ”We are very happy. We are at war with Israel and we expect a painful response from the army.”
Palestinian journalists reported that Rafah residents had celebrated in the streets and several had taken the soldiers’ remains.
Israel’s finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, told a security cabinet meeting that instead of negotiating for the return of the body parts Israel should cut the water and electricity supply to Gaza and limit the movement of Palestinians.
The justice minister, Yosef Lapid, said there would be no deal. ”You cannot enter into negotiations with cannibals.”
But the International Red Cross said it had been approached by Israel to mediate and relayed messages between the government, the Palestinian Authority and the militant groups. Iyad Nasser, a spokesperson for the ICRC in Gaza, said: ”The Geneva convention calls for parties to repatriate bodies and remains as soon as possible. We have been approached by Palestinian families in the past for help in this but this is the first time that the Israelis have asked us.”
The Palestinian Authority and Egyptian diplomats had put pressure on Hamas and Islamic Jihad to return the body parts, saying that their public display damaged claims by the groups to have launched a legitimate attack.
Ghazi Hamad, the editor of al-Risala, the Hamas weekly newspaper, said the killing of the six soldiers and the resistance in Zeitoun had sent a strong message to the Israelis that they could not enter Gaza with impunity.
The attacks have sharpened demands from the Israeli left that Sharon ignore the defeat in a Likud party referendum of his plan to pull Jewish settlers out of Gaza and implement it anyway — or put the issue to a national ballot.
Several analysts warned on Wednesday that the situation in Gaza increasingly resembled Israel’s bloody entanglement in Lebanon. ”What looks like Lebanon, smells like Lebanon, walks like Lebanon and bleeds like Lebanon, is Lebanon,” wrote Ben Caspit in the Ma’ariv newspaper. ”Gaza is Lebanon, Lebanon is Gaza.” – Guardian Unlimited Â