Israel kills 2 infiltrators from Gaza

In a rare breach of Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, two heavily armed Palestinians scaled a 25-foot-high wall Saturday, opened fire on an army outpost and eluded capture for nearly half a mile before soldiers tracked them down and killed them, Israeli officials said.

The incident was part of a surge of violence along the Israeli-Gaza border and in the West Bank that left 21 Palestinians dead last week, one of the summer’s bloodiest. Four of the dead were noncombatants.

Shrouded by early morning fog, the infiltrators used a ladder to scale the concrete wall and a rope to climb down the Israeli side, said Maj. Tal Lev-Ram, an Israeli army spokesman. Once across, the men exchanged fire with guards at an army post at the nearby Erez border crossing terminal and then led infantry forces on a chase deeper into Israeli territory.

The Palestinians carried grenades and automatic weapons with the intent to attack nearby Israeli communities, the army spokesman said. After a clash near the community of Netiv Haasara, soldiers hauled away the militants’ bodies with a robotic crane in case they were rigged with explosives.

Three militant groups, the Popular Resistance Committees, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, claimed responsibility for the attack in a joint statement. They said that two militants died after a “long battle” and that the fate of a third was unknown.

Lev-Ram, who briefed reporters by telephone, maintained that no more than two militants had crossed into Israel. Police and soldiers set up checkpoints and searched both sides of the border with help from spotters in a helicopter.

Israel’s 32-mile border with Gaza is barricaded with radar, concrete walls and electric fences. Palestinian militants have rarely crossed it since Israel withdrew settlers and army bases from the coastal territory two years ago.

Militants from Hamas and other Islamic groups tunneled under the border in June 2006, captured an Israeli soldier at a frontier outpost and spirited him back to Gaza. The soldier is still missing.

The border has grown increasingly tense since Hamas seized full control of Gaza two months ago and ousted the rival Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is holding peace talks with Israeli leaders.

Israel considers Hamas a terrorist group and has stepped up military incursions into the territory this summer to try to thwart rocket attacks and to search for cross-border tunnels.

The army said its troops entered Gaza on Friday and killed two gunmen who had fired at them across a border fence.

Abbas, whose government operates in the West Bank, warned Wednesday that Israel’s heightened military activity raised “plenty of doubt about its real intentions toward the peace process.” He called the deaths of Palestinians in those operations a “massacre” that could jeopardize his talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

The two leaders are expected to meet this week for the eighth time in eight months. They are working to shape the agenda of a Middle East peace conference that President Bush has called for the fall.

In an interim step, Israel this summer stopped pursuing 178 Fatah militants in the West Bank. But it has continued raiding the West Bank in search of militants with Islamic Jihad, which, like Hamas, opposes Abbas’ peacemaking efforts.

The latest raid occurred early Saturday when Israeli forces opened fire at a carload of Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank city of Jenin. Palestinian security officials said two Islamic Jihad militants were killed and two were wounded.

Israeli officials say such raids in the West Bank and Gaza are aimed at foiling attacks inside Israel.

But the operations have claimed innocent lives. An unarmed bystander was killed in the attack on the militants’ car. And on Friday an 11-year-old Arab citizen of Israel who was visiting relatives in the West Bank village of Saida was killed during a clash between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli troops.

Relatives of the boy, Mahmoud Ibrahim Karnawi, said the Israelis were trying to arrest his older half-brother, an Islamic Jihad militant.

boudreaux@latimes.com