Israeli Missiles Target Security Buildings in Central Gaza City

Israel blasted buildings of Palestinian security forces in the Gaza Strip with missiles Thursday, a day after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon held the Palestinian Authority responsible for the slayings of two Jewish teenagers.

Five surface-to-surface missiles slammed into downtown Gaza City. Dozens of people were injured, Palestinians said, and five were hospitalized.

The attack came hours after a roadside bomb killed two Romanian workers who were repairing a Gaza border fence for the Israelis.

Israeli troops also thrust several hundred yards into Palestinian-controlled territory in Gaza on Thursday, bulldozing crops and destroying a police outpost near the Kissufim crossing, where the Romanian workers were killed. Palestinians said three police officers and a civilian were wounded in a firefight that ensued.

“We are hitting where mortar fire and other attacks emanate from,” said Raanan Gissin, Sharon’s spokesman. Gissin denied that the missile attack and incursion were in retaliation for the slayings of the teens or the workers.

“We are striking at those targets where the terrorists find shelter, where they live, where they act from,” Gissin said. The Palestinian security forces with which Israel worked until fighting erupted in September “stopped being security forces a long time ago,” Gissin said. “They became terrorist forces, and we warned them several times against continuing this policy.”

Three of the missiles fired in the late afternoon reportedly struck Palestinian police headquarters. At least one other missile hit the offices of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, about 400 yards from his headquarters on the Gazan coast.

Plumes of smoke rose above the city as panicked crowds and police officers fled the buildings.

Nabil Shaath, Palestinian planning and international cooperation minister, denounced the attack as part of a “war of terror Israel has declared on the Palestinians.”

Hours before the missiles hit, Arafat had met in his offices with a delegation of Israeli peace activists and left-wing members of parliament, who said he indicated an eagerness to find a way back to negotiations.

But neither the Israeli government nor the nation’s public seems in any mood to start talking. Newspapers Thursday were dominated by headlines on the slayings in the West Bank of the 13- and 14-year-old boys, who police said were beaten to death when they went hiking in the hills near their West Bank settlement Tuesday. Their bodies were found in a blood-smeared cave.

“Skila” was the banner headline on the front page of the mass-circulation daily Yediot Aharonot. The Hebrew word refers to stoning, one of four forms of capital punishment allowed in ancient Jewish law.

Israeli commentators blamed Islamic religious leaders and the Palestinian Authority for inciting acts of individual revenge against Jews.

The slayings, wrote Sever Plotzker in the newspaper, were “the result of the dehumanization of the ‘Zionist enemy’ in internal Arab propaganda . . . it is the result of the addition of the dimension of a religious war to the bitter end against Jews to the dispute about permanent borders between two nations.”

But Palestinians denied that the killings were an anti-Semitic act, or that incitement in Palestinian and Arab media, which some intellectuals acknowledge does exist, is the cause for such attacks.

“It is easier for the Israelis to focus on the incitement and to avoid talking about the reality for Palestinians,” said Dr. Sami Adwan, a professor of education at Bethlehem University. “It is the reality itself that is creating hatred.”

While deploring the killing of any civilian, Adwan maintained that Israelis are missing an important element of motivation for such crimes if they refuse to take into account the living conditions of 3 million Palestinians after seven months of fighting that has claimed more than 500 lives, most of them Palestinian.

“Israelis don’t talk about the harassment by the settlers, about the closing of roads, about attacks on schools, about how life has become unendurable,” he said. “We are piling up hatred that could last for centuries.”