Israeli Armor Storms West Bank Town in Fierce Attack on Gunmen

Israeli troops and armor thrust into Palestinian territory once more Sunday, entering this heavily Christian town to do fierce battle with Palestinian gunmen in the first such incursion in the West Bank.

At least one Palestinian militia officer was reported killed and 20 other Palestinians were injured, including a 5-year-old boy hit by a tank shell. One Israeli soldier was also hurt. Throughout the morning and into early afternoon, explosions reverberated and smoke billowed from Beit Jala, a suburb of Bethlehem just south of Jerusalem. Terrified residents fled their battered homes.

Israel said it pushed into Beit Jala to stop Palestinian gunmen who were firing on Israeli army positions and on a nearby road used primarily by Jewish settlers. Several settlers have been shot dead on the road since the Palestinian revolt erupted seven months ago, and, after a lull, gunfire had resumed late Saturday and early Sunday.

“The Palestinian gunfire was effective and dangerous, and this was the only way to stop it,” Brig. Gen. Benny Gantz, head of Israeli army forces in the West Bank, said in an impromptu news conference as his troops secured the contested road.

“I don’t intend to conquer Palestinian-controlled territory,” Gantz said. “Our demands to the Palestinians were clear: If they don’t shoot, it will be quiet. If they do shoot, there will be war.”

Israeli forces withdrew about four hours after they entered.

The 2-month-old government of right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has staged several incursions into the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip since April 11. But as the first in the West Bank, Sunday’s operation signaled that the “new rules” the Israeli army says it is operating under apply here as well.

“In principle, I have approved any entry to Area A [Palestinian-controlled territory], if that’s necessary to guarantee our security,” Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer told reporters Sunday.

From the beginning of the uprising, mostly Muslim Palestinian gunmen from elsewhere in the West Bank used the residential streets of Beit Jala to fire on the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo on Jerusalem’s southern outskirts. Israel regularly responded with heavy shelling. Beit Jala residents, caught in the middle, protested until, about two weeks ago, they persuaded Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to order the gunmen out.

Since then, residents said Sunday, all was quiet. But the previous night, they said, militiamen from the armed wing of Arafat’s Fatah political movement returned and started shooting at Israeli targets.

Sunday morning, Israeli tanks began shelling Palestinian positions in Beit Jala while many of the town’s Christian residents were getting ready for church or walking to celebrations of the feast of St. George.

Paratroopers on foot, backed by tanks, entered the village from the southwestern edge, residents said. The army said its forces pushed about 500 yards into sovereign Palestinian territory. In contrast to the Gaza raids, there were no bulldozers or large-scale demolitions of homes or orchards.

Hearing explosions, Akram Attallah quickly hid along with his wife and three young sons in the basement of his new four-story home, where they waited, counting the shells that fell all around and shook the ground. One hit the water tanks on their roof, and water spilled through the staircase. When things grew quiet, Attallah ventured upstairs, peaked through a window and saw Israeli soldiers, in full battle dress, crouching and firing as they advanced.

“I’d never seen anything like that,” Attallah, 40, said. “It was like you see in the movies. I felt I was in a real war.”

The next two shells hit his house and set it on fire. The family escaped, running through dusty olive groves to safety. Attallah, a researcher on socioeconomic issues for a Norwegian nongovernmental agency, recounted his story Sunday behind a row of storefronts where he and several dozen Palestinian youths, paramedics and others were hiding from the gunfire. About 300 yards up the road, his white stone house stood on a hillside, bright orange flames leaping from the roof.

The gunman who was killed was identified as Mohammed Abeiat, a militia commander whose cousin Hussein was tracked and killed by a helicopter gunship in November in the first of what has become an established Israeli policy of eliminating key militants.

Sunday started out with another familiar terror attack. Palestinian militants claimed responsibility for a bomb placed at a bus station in the Israeli city of Petah Tikva. It exploded just as Sunday morning commuters were starting back to work. Five people were slightly injured, police said. It was the third bomb to go off in Petah Tikva in seven months and the 12th in Israel in recent weeks. Some of the explosions have been deadly.

On Saturday, Israel fired rockets on a Palestinian Authority intelligence headquarters in Jericho, and Israeli troops shot to death a senior Palestinian member of the radical Islamic Jihad, Palestinian officials said.

The violence came as Israel and the Palestinians digested the findings of a U.S.-led commission of inquiry on causes behind the last seven months of bloodshed, along with ways to prevent further violence. The commission was formed last year and is led by former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell of Maine. It issued a 32-page report Friday, but expectations are low among Israelis and Palestinians alike that the commission’s report will break the logjam of mutual recrimination.

Sharon used his weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday to blast the committee’s urging that the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza be halted.

Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed-Rabbo said Sunday that the report was “incomplete” but did offer “positive” possibilities for finding a way out of the crisis.