Palestinians Expect Reprisal After Attacks on Settlements

GAZA CITY — Fearing a new round of tit-for-tat fighting, Palestinians braced today for a possible Israeli reprisal for mortar attacks on Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.

One mortar round scored a direct hit on a house in the Gush Katif settlement bloc in southern Gaza on Thursday. In other attacks, a mortar shell fell in Israel near the Gaza Strip, and another landed near the Netzarim Jewish settlement in Gaza.

No one was hurt in any of the incidents. But Israel has recently responded to such attacks by pounding Palestinian security targets with missiles, in a new strategy to quell a 7 1/2-month-old uprising.

Palestinians have reacted to the Israeli attacks with defiance and cries for revenge.

“They think they can bring the Palestinian people to their knees, forgetting that . . . we will never be humiliated and we will never surrender,” Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat told reporters in Gaza on Thursday.

At least 425 Palestinians, 13 Israeli Arabs and 80 other Israelis have been killed since the uprising against Israeli occupation erupted in September after peace negotiations stalled.

Israel, meanwhile, has found itself on the defensive over the 145 Jewish settlements that dot the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories it captured in the 1967 Middle East War and that Palestinians want for a future state.

An official with the International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that Jewish settlements on land Israel occupied in the 1967 conflict constitute a war crime under humanitarian law.

“The policy of settlement as such in humanitarian law is a war crime,” Rene Kosirnik, head of the Red Cross delegation in Israel, told a news conference in Jerusalem.

Israel accused the Red Cross of siding with the Palestinians on settlements, a matter that the two sides agreed in interim peace deals to resolve in peace negotiations for a final treaty.

In new violence late Thursday, Palestinian gunmen opened fire on Israeli tanks and troops on the Gazan-Egyptian border after a roadside bomb explosion that witnesses said appeared to have damaged an Israeli tank but caused no casualties.

Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen also exchanged fire in the West Bank in what has become an almost nightly ritual. Two Palestinian security men were wounded in an exchange of fire near the West Bank town of Ramallah, hospital officials said.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations in New York on Thursday, Arab countries failed to get the Security Council to hold a formal meeting on Middle East violence, with the council saying it wasn’t the right time and the United States making clear that it would veto any resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.