Palestinian fighters killed at least 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 Monday.
The army would not confirm the number of deaths in the attack next to the Rafah refugee camp, but Palestinian witnesses said they had seen five bodies.
Israeli helicopters were swiftly dispatched to try to prevent the remnants of the dead soldiers being removed, but an Islamic Jihad spokesperson phoned a Gaza radio station to say the organisation was in possession of some human remains. Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles raided Rafah on Wednesday night to recover the dead soldiers.
In Gaza City the army killed at least five Palestinians and wounded dozens more, many of them civilians, as it continued its search of the Zeitoun neighbourhood for the remains of the six Israelis killed on Monday, including the head of one that 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.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad offered on Wednesday to hand over the body parts on condition Israel withdrew its forces from Zeitoun.
Israel had earlier insisted there would 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 this week authorities were talking to foreign mediators, led by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Egyptian diplomats, in an attempt to break the deadlock. The killings near Rafah, however, are likely to undercut the negotiations.
The attack appears to have been a well-planned ambush that 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 then blown up itself, 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.
”We declare our responsibility for the killing of soldiers and we state that we have parts of the body of a female soldier,” a spokesperson said.
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 residents of Rafah had celebrated in the streets and several had taken the soldiers’ remains.
Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told a Security Cabinet meeting that instead of negotiating for the return of the body parts Israel should cut off the water and electricity supply to Gaza and severely limit the movement of Palestinians.
Justice Minister Yosef Lapid said there would be no deal.
”You cannot enter into negotiations with cannibals. We should do whatever we can to get the body parts back, but we should be careful not to pay the price the Palestinians want.”
But the ICRC said it had been approached by Israel to mediate and was relaying messages between the government, the Palestinian Authority and the militant groups.
Iyad Nasser, a spokesperson for the ICRC in Gaza, said: ”We have contacts with all parties and actors in this region, even the military wings. 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 have also 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 against an occupation force.
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.
”This will increase the pressure on Israeli society that they should not stay in Gaza,” he said.
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, which opinion polls show he would win easily.
Several analysts warned this week 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 Ma’ariv newspaper.
”Gaza is Lebanon, Lebanon is Gaza.” — Â