Heavy Arms for Palestinians Seized, Israel Navy Says

The Israeli navy said Monday that it had captured a boat loaded with long-range weaponry destined for Palestinian fighters. The announcement of the confiscations came hours after a Palestinian baby was killed and two dozen civilians were wounded in heavy Israeli shelling of a refugee camp.

Israeli military officers called a hasty news conference and put the captured weapons on display, lining up row after row of Katyusha ground-to-ground rockets, antiaircraft missiles, mines and rocket-propelled antitank grenades. They said they had intercepted the fishing vessel in the Mediterranean as it headed from northern Lebanon to the Gaza Strip.

If true, this would be the most concrete evidence to date that the Palestinians are far better armed than they have admitted. Israeli officials asserted that the smuggling of such long-range weaponry proves that the Palestinians were equipping themselves to attack Israeli cities.

“They are organizing for war,” Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer charged Monday night.

Under the terms of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, the Palestinians are allowed to have thousands of machine guns, assault rifles and pistols, but no artillery. Normally vastly outgunned Palestinian militants recently began firing mortars at Jewish settlements and towns, doing psychological but little physical damage.

Israeli officials said the smuggling operation was organized by a dissident Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Its leader, Abu Ali Mustafa, said Monday night that the whole story was a fabrication by Israelis trying to hide their crimes. He noted that the Israelis have kept very tight control of the coast since the beginning of the Palestinian revolt seven months ago.

By “crimes,” Mustafa was referring to a barrage of tank fire that Israeli forces unleashed Monday, in the middle of the day and without warning, against buildings in a refugee camp and three other neighborhoods in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip. The shelling came in response to Palestinian firing of four mortars at two Jewish settlements, also in Gaza. No Israelis were hurt by the mortar fire.

Among the Palestinians, however, a 4-month-old girl, Iman Hijjo, was killed when her cinder-block home was shattered by a tank round and shrapnel dug a hole in her back. Her mother was critically wounded, and a sister, brother and grandmother were also hurt.

Of about 25 people who were rushed to a Gaza hospital, 10 were children, Palestinian doctors said. An elementary school was among the buildings heavily damaged in the bombardment.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, visiting Iman’s wounded mother in the hospital later Monday, condemned the “criminal Israeli escalation” and vowed that it wouldn’t force him to compromise.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon apologized for the killing of the baby, saying he was sure Israeli troops didn’t intend to harm a child.

Iman is apparently the youngest fatality in the conflict. A 10-month-old Jewish girl was shot dead by a Palestinian gunman in the West Bank city of Hebron in March. According to an Associated Press count, of 436 Palestinians killed, at least 106 were younger than 18; of at least 72 people killed on the Israeli side, four were younger than 18.

“Children and babies should not be involved in this terrible war that we would like one day to finish,” Sharon said. But in a speech opening the summer session of the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, Sharon vowed an uncompromising fight against terror and warned his nation of a protracted battle.

Early today, the army reported that an Israeli settler was shot dead in the West Bank near the Jewish settlement of Itamar, state radio said.

The Palestinian Authority late Monday denied knowledge of the purported arms shipment. The Israelis said the weapons were packed in barrels that were to be dropped in the water and picked up by Gazans.

The weapons would crank up the Palestinian firepower considerably. The surface-to-surface rockets, for example, can reach the large Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon. The SA-7 missiles in theory could shoot down anything from helicopter gunships, which the Israelis frequently use against Palestinians, to commercial aircraft.

By all accounts, Israelis and Palestinians are locked in a terrible cycle of escalation and retaliation. Arafat’s Fatah political movement announced Monday that it was reactivating militant “popular committees” that had been recently ordered to stop their activities.

The Israeli army has new orders allowing it to charge into Palestinian-controlled land in the stated pursuit of Palestinian gunmen. The first such operation in the West Bank, in the town of Beit Jala on Sunday, was followed by three briefer incursions Monday.

The U.S. State Department condemned the “green light” given to the Israeli army as a “serious escalation.” Israeli opposition leader Yossi Sarid said it is only a matter of time before overly aggressive tactics lead to a massacre.

“It ought to be clear to this government that force is not the answer and that these infiltrations will only lead to disaster,” Sarid said in a speech to the Knesset.

“Today’s Sharon, I regret to say, is yesterday’s man,” he said. “He is a man of the old and dangerous Middle East--someone who doesn’t understand that our war of independence is over and that the present war is their war of independence.”