Fierce Fighting Brings Citizens Into Line of Fire

As Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak courted right-wing hawk Ariel Sharon for a new emergency government Monday, the Palestinian uprising brought fierce gun battles for the second straight night to Jerusalem’s doorstep.

Barak is making a last-ditch attempt to salvage his hold on power, even as he retreats from the peacemaking agenda that was the hallmark of his rule, and as his credentials as guarantor of Israeli national security take a beating.

After nightfall Monday, Palestinian gunmen and Israeli troops traded fire between the Palestinian town of Beit Jala and the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo on the southern edge of Jerusalem. The two communities sit about 700 yards apart, on opposite sides of a valley.

In a repeat of the previous night’s shooting, Palestinians let loose with automatic weapons, peppering apartment buildings in Gilo and panicking residents, who were ordered to stay inside and keep their lights out. Israeli troops shot back at Beit Jala with helicopter gunships, machine-gun fire and tank shells, the heaviest ordnance used in nearly four weeks of deadly street combat.

Some of the Israeli ammunition Sunday night crashed through the bedroom of 3-year-old George Nazal.

Inside the pinkish stone house at the corner of Al Mughtarebin and St. Nicholas streets, George on Monday was digging through the powdered stucco that had been his bedroom wall, which now covered the floor, blue bedspreads and his toys. A missile that witnesses said was fired from an Israeli combat helicopter slammed through the exterior wall, shot across the room and broke through an interior wall, finally puncturing the washing machine.

“I don’t know why they fired at us,” said George’s mother, Suha Nazal, sitting limp in a living room chair under a picture of the Virgin Mary. “This looks like a house. It is a house. Whoever did this is merciless.”

Israeli security officials said they believed that Palestinian gunmen were firing from the multifamily building where the Nazals live, possibly without the Nazals’ permission.

Nazal, 21, and her husband, Samer, who worked at the prosperous casino in the West Bank town of Jericho until the crisis shut it down, were able to grab George and his younger sister from the room where they were sleeping minutes before the missile hit.

“I was so terrified I couldn’t breathe,” Nazal said. “The noise, the chaos, the children crying--it was blinding.”

From the Nazals’ front door, two Israeli tanks were visible across the valley on a hillside just below Gilo. A Jewish neighborhood built on land that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War, Gilo is considered by Israelis to be part of Jerusalem. Palestinians regard it as another Jewish settlement on occupied land.

In Gilo, residents vowed not to be intimidated. Zehava Zaken, principal of the Gilo school, said that psychological counseling was being offered to children and their parents and that consideration was being given to transferring pupils to classrooms that don’t face Beit Jala.

Israeli President Moshe Katzav toured Gilo and told residents that the shooting cannot continue. “Either the Palestinian Authority becomes responsible and stops the shooting, or the army will do it,” Katzav said.

Israeli army spokesman Col. Raanan Gissin defended the use of heavy ammunition on a densely populated town, saying Beit Jala invited its punishment by shooting on Gilo.

“It would be like firing on Beverly Hills from Wilshire Boulevard. How do you think the LAPD would respond?” Gissin said. “Beit Jala became a front-line position in the Palestinian war for independence.”

He said the shooters probably were members of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement who have taken up positions in civilian homes. The goal of tank fire is not to eliminate the gunmen, but to send a warning to all of Beit Jala, he said. Gissin said Israeli soldiers using loudspeakers had urged the residents of Beit Jala to evacuate their homes before the attack began.

Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli army chief of staff, warned that his forces would surround Beit Jala and that, unless the lives of the Jews of Gilo return to normal, the people of Beit Jala also would suffer.

Citizens such as those in Beit Jala are increasingly being drawn into the line of fire as Palestinian militias take their fight into urban centers.

Israeli television commentator Ehud Yaari said Beit Jala, which was never involved in Palestinian uprisings, was chosen by Palestinian leaders in hopes of forcing Israel to launch retaliatory attacks on the town’s largely Christian population.

For Israelis, the not-so-distant explosions heard in affluent southern Jerusalem were extremely disconcerting and further compounded the pressure on Barak.

Barak formally invited his chief rival, Sharon, to join him in an emergency coalition. Sharon has rejected the offer, but negotiations with half a dozen political factions, including Sharon’s Likud Party, were to continue today. Bringing Sharon into the government is widely seen as the final blow to the Middle East peace process.

It was Sharon’s Sept. 28 visit to Jerusalem’s most hotly contested holy shrine--known as the Temple Mount to Jews, Haram al Sharif to Muslims--that ignited the unrest engulfing the West Bank and Gaza Strip and threatening regional stability. More than 120 people, most of them Arabs, have died.

Many in Barak’s Labor Party oppose an alliance with Sharon, a former general and architect of Israel’s 1982 occupation of Lebanon who was held indirectly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Christian militiamen near Beirut.

Yossi Beilin, Barak’s justice minister and a leading proponent of the Oslo peace accords, called for a “coalition of sanity” instead of one with Sharon, whose presence, he said, would erase all the gains Barak had made in attempting to end decades of Arab-Israeli conflict.

Meir Shetrit, a Likud Party leader, said Sharon and his associates want to be given the same rank and number of ministerial portfolios as Barak’s Labor Party members.

Sharon wants to be able to veto diplomatic moves and slow any effort to resume peace negotiations. He has said he would demand that Barak renounce the concessions that the prime minister was prepared to make to the Palestinians at July’s failed Camp David summit, including giving up parts of the Jordan Valley and East Jerusalem.

Barak met Sharon a day after announcing a “timeout” in peace talks with the Palestinians and after an Arab League condemnation of Israel and an order to suspend economic ties. The Arab League’s decision has more symbolic than concrete value because commerce between the Jewish state and the Arab world remains for the most part minimal. However, on Monday, Morocco, one of Israel’s closer friends, announced that it was closing liaison offices in Tel Aviv and Rabat, the Moroccan capital.

Also Monday, a powerful roadside bomb exploded near a convoy of Jewish settlers and their military escort in Gaza. There were no injuries. Earlier, Israel ordered the Gaza airport closed for the second time in three weeks as punishment for the continuing violence.

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