Ariel Sharon said on Sunday that an assault on the Gaza strip that has claimed more than 60 lives and injured 250 people — the bloodiest of the intifada — will be expanded until it puts an end to Hamas rocket strikes against Israel.
At least eight people were killed on Sunday, most of them insurgents. But the dead also included a 13-year old boy and a deaf and mute man shot in his home by an Israeli sniper.
About 2 000 troops backed by 200 tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopters have reoccupied swaths of northern Gaza in order to carve out a 10km wide buffer zone along the border. Israeli forces have also for the first time entered the Jabaliya refugee camp, where most of the fighting of the past five days has taken place.
Sharon said Operation Days of Penitence, launched after a Hamas rocket fired from Gaza killed two children in the Israeli town of Sderot last week, will not end swiftly.
”It is necessary to bring about a complete end to the firing of rockets on Sderot and other towns that border the Gaza strip. The current situation cannot continue,” the prime minister told Israel radio. ”We have to expand … the areas of operation in order to get the rocket launchers out of the range of Israeli towns.”
Sharon said the assault would not affect his plan to withdraw all Jewish settlers and Israeli military bases from the Gaza strip by the end of next year. But the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees said the reoccupation could contribute to a further collapse of difficult conditions in Gaza.
Thousands of people have been trapped for days with no water or electricity, and the chronically ill without access to hospitals.
The death toll continued to rise on Sunday. The army killed at least four Palestinian fighters in missile strikes. One was against a group of men who had just fired a rocket into Israel, and a 16-year-old youth with them. Another missile targeted two Islamic Jihad activists in Jabaliya.
More than 30 tanks and bulldozers moved into an area north-east of Jabaliya to demolish houses, factories and a kindergarten, following days of destruction in northern Gaza. On Sunday night the Israeli air force fired two missiles at militants in Gaza city, wounding three people, witnesses said.
The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, declared a state of emergency in Gaza and called on the international community to ”stop these inhumane and racist crimes”. But the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, urged Hamas and similar groups ”to think about the higher national interest and not give Israel excuses to continue the aggression against our people in Gaza”.
The US urged Israel to avoid civilian casualties but said it had the right to defend its citizens against terrorism.
So far though the Israeli military has avoided the scale of civilian casualties that forced it to curtail its assault on Rafah camp in southern Gaza in May, when a high proportion of those killed were children and women shot by Israeli snipers, and a tank fired a shell into a peaceful demonstration.
The fighting in Gaza has prompted a fresh confrontation between Israel and the UN after the military said one of its spy drones spotted a UN ambulance being used to transport a Hamas rocket. Israel said its ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, would demand that the UN dismiss the head of its Palestinian refugee agency, Peter Hansen.
But Hansen said the grainy Israeli video showed UN ambulance workers carrying a stretcher, not a rocket. He said it was not the first time the government had ”propagated falsehoods” against the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
”A few months ago, two Cabinet ministers declared in public that UNRWA ambulances were carrying body parts of fallen Israeli soldiers. When challenged to produce the evidence backing up this claim, or to retract the statement and offer an apology, the ministers in question were not able to provide any response and have remained silent.”
In May, Gillerman told the UN security council that an Israeli shell fired into a peaceful demonstration in Rafah had mostly killed gunmen. In fact, the dead were children or unarmed adults. – Guardian Unlimited Â