Killing Stirs Israeli Debate on Pullout From Gaza Strip

With the killing of an Israeli civilian deep in the occupied Gaza Strip on Tuesday, debate intensified among Israelis over whether they should not simply pull out of the troublesome region, abandoning it to the Palestinian residents and sealing its borders.

Although previous calls for a unilateral withdrawal were dismissed as impractical, politically as well as militarily, the proposals were renewed after the Monday slaying of two Israelis in downtown Tel Aviv by a Gaza youth and the Tuesday killing of a 40-year-old Israeli at a Gaza refugee camp.

Chaim Ramon, the health minister and an influential member of the governing Labor Party, called upon Israel to announce a date for its unilateral withdrawal if no agreement is reached with Palestinians on autonomy for the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Israel has no interest in staying in Gaza,” Ramon declared. “Our control of the Gaza Strip is a national disaster. That’s the reason we should pull out, not because someone brandished a knife.”

Support for a pullout came from the dovish Meretz bloc, Labor’s major partner in the government coalition. “We should prepare ourselves for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza,” said Ran Cohen, the deputy housing minister. “In the case of peace, with an agreement; in the case of no peace, then a withdrawal that will result in new security arrangements, outside Gaza and around Gaza.”

Avraham Poraz, a Meretz member of Parliament, urged the country to rid itself of “this cancer that is called the Gaza Strip and enable a Palestinian state to be established.”

And Interior Minister Arye Deri, the leader of the Shas Party, another coalition partner, said the Cabinet must consider this option seriously in its search for an Arab-Israeli peace settlement and a solution to the Palestinian question.

The proposals drew immediate objections from other Cabinet members, who warned that Israel could not be defended from attacks from the Gaza Strip simply by fencing it off. They, as had Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, emphasized the need for a negotiated solution.

“Any withdrawal from the Gaza Strip that does not take into consideration the frustrations and problems there, that does not attempt to deal with these in a manner that will provide a serious solution and, most importantly, that will not guarantee huge investments won’t solve a thing,” said Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the housing minister and a retired general.

The latest Israeli death was that of a 40-year-old employee of a gas company, who, despite heightened tensions in the wake of the Tel Aviv murders, sought to keep a business appointment at the main fuel depot of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, just north of the border with Egypt.

The man, whose identity was withheld by an Israeli military spokesman, turned the wrong way and ran into a hailstorm of stones as he drove into a Palestinian refugee camp, one of the largest and most volatile in the region. As he tried to back out, a masked Palestinian gunman, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, fired four shots at close range, killing him.

The whole Gaza Strip had been closed before dawn on Tuesday after the Tel Aviv murders; there were repeated confrontations between Israeli troops and Palestinian youths through much of the region.

In a separate incident, reflecting the tensions felt throughout the country after the Tel Aviv murders, an Israeli settler from the occupied West Bank reportedly shot to death a 74-year-old Palestinian waiting for evening prayers outside a mosque in the East Jerusalem suburb of Ras Amoud.