Two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike on the Gaza Strip on Friday morning, just hours after around 100 Israeli tanks moved deep into the area in a hunt for militants.
The latest campaign, which began three days ago and aims to stop rocket attacks on southern Israel, intensified after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave a green light to a larger operation codenamed ”Days of Penitence”.
Forty Palestinians and five Israelis have been killed so far, two of them toddlers who died in a rocket attack on Sderot on Wednesday, just across the Gaza border.
Thirty-five tanks were seen entering Beit Hanun, while another 30 were seen pushing into Beit Lahiya and 30 more spotted moving into the eastern sector of Jabaliya, all in northern Gaza.
The Israeli security Cabinet on Thursday unanimously approved a broadening of the ongoing operation, which it said was open-ended.
The army will carry out an ”aggressive and ongoing activity” in the Jabaliya refugee camp and the nearby town of Beit Hanun to halt the flow of Qassam rockets fired at Israel by Palestinian militants, a defence official said late on Thursday.
Earlier, the official said the security Cabinet was likely to endorse a broader operation in the Gaza Strip that would see Israel reoccupying wide areas of the territory.
But he stressed it would not be ”a permanent occupation”.
”We are intending to make the Palestinians pay a heavy price so they will understand that continuing to fire Qassam rockets does not pay,” the official said.
Members of the security cabinet have been allegely pressing for the army to carry out a second ”Defensive Shield-style” operation in the Gaza Strip, the radio said.
Launched in March 2002, Operation Defensive Shield saw the army reoccupying most of the West Bank in a bid to detain Palestinian militants and put a halt to a spate of suicide bombings.
On Friday morning, a senior government official repeated the threat, saying the army will intensify its operation if rocket attacks continue.
”If rocket fire continues, we will broaden our operation on the ground and be more aggressive,” he said on condition of anonymity.
Qassam rockets are fired by the hardline Hamas group and named after its armed wing — the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades.
The Israeli daily Haaretz said on Friday that the army was set take control of nine-kilometre buffer zone from the northern Gaza Strip borders with Israel up to the outskirts of Jabaliya.
The paper noted that the Qassam rockets have a firing range of around nine kilometres.
The rockets can carry of five-kilogram charge.
”The army can hope mainly to gain time by temporarily reducing the threat on Sderot, in the hope that meanwhile, some agreement, also temporary, will be clinched with Palestinian security organisations to stop the shooting,” wrote the paper.
”Palestinians must pay the price,” read an editorial in the mass-circulation paper Yediot Aharonot.
”What is going on in Gaza goes beyond terrorism, it is akin to a guerrilla, and even a real war. When it’s war, it’s war.”
The decision to intensify the raid came after one of the bloodiest days in the four-year-old Palestinian intifada, or uprising.
The two latest victims of violence died Friday morning in an air raid on Jabaliya refugee camp, sources on both sides said.
The dead were both militants, Palestinians security sources said, identifying one of them as 35-year-old Atef Sabbah from Hamas.
An army spokesperson said the air raid had targeted militants who were about to fire a Qassam rocket.
Palestinian witnesses said an unmanned plane had fired on the men. Earlier, witnesses had spoken of a tank shell being fired. Four other people were wounded in the incident, medics said, adding that another shell had been fired on Jabaliya earlier, injuring at least one person.
The latest violence raised to 4,395 the number of people killed since the start of the intifada, or uprising, four years ago. They include 3 371 Palestinians and 953 Israelis, according to an AFP count.
In other developments, Israeli police decided to limit access to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound as it said it feared disturbances for the fourth anniversary of the intifada, or Palestinian uprising.
Only women and men aged above 40 will be authorised to pray at the compound after midday.
A controversial visit by then opposition leader Sharon to the site, sacred to both Muslims and Jews, sparked the first clashes of the intifada on September 28, 2000.
In other unrest, a Palestinian suspected of collaborating with Israel was shot and badly wounded by a group of masked men in the northern West Bank two of Jenin overnight, medics said. – Sapa-AFP