Israel ready for weeks of hostilities in Gaza
Starting the fifth day of Israel’s largest offensive in Gaza in four years of conflict, army commanders were today talking of a weeks-long operation, while officials looked even further ahead – to Israel’s planned evacuation of settlements from Gaza next year.
Ambulances brought the bodies of three Palestinians to a Gaza hospital. Rescue workers said the bodies were found near the Jebaliya refugee camp, focus of the fighting, but it was not clear how they died or who they were. A tank was seen at the end of the street, and residents reported gunfire.
Earlier, Israeli forces targeted a local Hamas commander in a Gaza City air strike, seriously wounding him, another militant and a woman, witnesses and hospital officials said. The military had no comment.
The large-scale operation in northern Gaza gathered momentum again late yesterday when about 25 tanks moved into Beit Hanoun, the town closest to the Israeli border.
About 15,000 people living in the area of the raid have been without water and electricity for days.
A rocket attack on the town on Wednesday killed two children and set off the operation. Since Thursday, 58 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed. At least eight Palestinians, including a 13-year-old boy, were killed yesterday.
Israeli forces have cleared a 5-mile buffer zone in Gaza to move its towns out of range of the rockets, but militants keep trying. An Israeli helicopter fired a missile at militants, killing two, just after they shot off a rocket.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pledged to expand the area under Israeli control to stop the rocket fire.
“The forces will have to remain there as long as this danger exists,” Sharon told Army Radio, and Lt Gen Moshe Yaalon, the army commander, said, “The troops are ready to continue, not in terms of days, but weeks.”
Israeli officials fear that continuing rocket fire might undermine already shaky support for Sharon’s Gaza pullout plan. Critics warn that after an Israeli exit, the rocket attacks would only escalate.
Many of the critics are from Sharon’s own Likud Party, which has voted against the plan twice in different frameworks. Sharon and Likud have for decades been the main forces behind settlement construction and expansion, and Sharon’s party members have not taken kindly to his change of heart.
Presenting his plan to evacuate all 21 Gaza settlements and four small ones from the West Bank, Sharon said the presence of 8,000 Jewish settlers among 1.3 million Palestinians had become untenable, and the Gaza pullout would contribute to strengthening Israel’s hold on main settlement blocs in the West Bank. About 236,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank.
In the meantime, militants in Gaza are stepping up their attacks to show that they are driving the Israelis out, while Israel counters with additional force to stop the militants and reverse the impression of fleeing under fire.
The fighting, concentrated in the Jebaliya refugee camp, has caused heavy damage. Palestinians say the Israeli forces have destroyed homes, torn up roads and left a kindergarten in rubble.
