2 Children Die in Israeli Raid

Israeli helicopter gunships fired missiles into a Palestinian car in Hebron on Monday, botching an assassination attempt on an Islamic militant and killing a toddler and a teenager. A dozen people were injured.

Shortly before the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tried to persuade U.S. envoy Anthony C. Zinni to keep working on a cease-fire, the day after Zinni threatened to leave if both sides didn’t make a serious effort to stop the shooting. Later, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat also asked Zinni to stay.

But neither side seemed willing or able to make the “substantial gestures” the retired Marine Corps general demanded Sunday when he told Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs that he would return to Washington unless real progress toward a cease-fire was made in the next 48 hours.

Early today, Israeli combat helicopters shelled an outpost of Arafat’s Force 17 presidential guard in the Gaza Strip. At least six missiles were fired into the building in Beit Hanoun, north of Gaza City, causing extensive damage. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Israel Radio said the attack was in retaliation for Palestinian shelling of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip on Monday that injured two Israeli children, ages 3 and 4.

Israel’s attack in Hebron, in the West Bank, was the sort of operation that in this conflict usually triggers another round of bloodletting. It was Israel’s assassination Nov. 23 of Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, a top military leader of the Hamas militant movement, that triggered a series of revenge suicide bombings inside Israel by Islamic extremists that have killed more than two dozen people in less than two weeks.

This time the target was a military leader of the Islamic Jihad movement, Mohammed Sidr. It was Islamic Jihad that claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing Sunday in the northern Israeli port city of Haifa that killed only the bomber.

In a statement, the army said it hunted down Sidr because of attacks he had planned and helped carry out against Israelis and because he was about to dispatch cells to Israel to carry out more attacks.

Palestinian witnesses said two helicopter gunships fired a total of three missiles at a car Sidr was driving down Salaam Street. Accounts of witnesses and survivors differed, but apparently Burhan Himuni, Sidr’s 3-year-old nephew, was a passenger in his car. The toddler was sitting on the lap of Mohammed Himuni, his father, when two missiles slammed into the car and reduced it to a pile of charred, twisted metal.

Burhan died instantly of massive head wounds, according to Bassem Natsheh, spokesman at Hebron’s Al Ahli Hospital, where the dead and wounded were taken. Sidr suffered moderate injuries and Mohammed Himuni was seriously wounded in his legs, Natsheh said. At least one leg was amputated.

The second child, Shadi Arafi, 13, was riding with his father in a taxi behind Sidr’s car. Arafi died instantly when he was hit in the head and neck by shrapnel, Natsheh said. Two other vehicles and several shops were also damaged. Most of those injured suffered only light wounds, Natsheh said.

The helicopters struck as Hebron residents hurried to finish afternoon shopping before the iftar meal observed each night during the monthlong Muslim fast of Ramadan. The copters fired missiles on a street thick with cars and pedestrians.

“Excuse me,” Natsheh said, and then used an epithet to describe the Israelis “for targeting someone on a busy street at a time of day when there is so much traffic, so many civilians around.”

Daniel Ayalon, an advisor to Sharon, said Sidr was targeted as he prepared to send suicide attackers to the southern Israeli market town of Beersheba. “If they [members of the Palestinian Authority] don’t do the prevention, it leaves us no choice but to do it,” Ayalon said in a telephone interview.

Ayalon dismissed the suggestion that the attack might anger Zinni by dealing a blow to his efforts to quell the violence.

“I think the demands are on the Palestinians,” Ayalon said. Israel’s policy of hunting down militants and killing them “is a matter of self-defense. If we don’t do it and suffer casualties here, then we have to react even more massively.”

Sharon “told Gen. Zinni that he attaches great importance to continuing [the U.S.] mission in the region and said Israel would do its utmost to help him,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement after the Sharon-Zinni meeting.

In a statement issued Monday night, the Israeli army detailed what it said were the attacks Sidr was responsible for and said the military “makes every effort to prevent the loss of life of innocent civilians and deeply regrets such loss of life.” Israel has carried out dozens of what it calls “targeted killings” in the last 14 months and has killed and injured people in error before in its hunt for militants.

The Bush administration, European governments and human rights groups have denounced such killings as extrajudicial, but polls show they have broad support from Israelis. Arafat says they make it more difficult for him to rein in Islamic militants.

Israel Radio said the army was conducting a full investigation into the Hebron attack.

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Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report.