Truce Effort Dead After Gaza Bloodshed

Israelis and Palestinians buried their latest dead Wednesday, as they also buried the remnants of a U.S.-backed cease-fire that never really took hold.

Here in the northern Gaza Strip, Israeli forces captured another swath of Palestinian land, carving out a half-mile-deep buffer zone around several Jewish settlements. Israeli tanks, backed by gunboats in the Mediterranean and helicopters, shelled the area as Israeli bulldozers advanced against Palestinian return fire.

Eight Palestinian security posts were destroyed, acres of crops uprooted and six Palestinians killed when tank shells ripped apart their cars: four paramilitary policemen and two farmers, Maher Khdeir and Mahmoud Shurafa.

“We are finished, finished,” cried Khdeir’s cousin, Jamal Abu Halima, as the two bodies passed by in a funeral cortege winding its way through tense, dusty streets of this hard-hit town. Much of the family’s potato fields was being crushed by Israeli forces as Abu Halima spoke. “Now we are worse than refugees.”

About three miles away in the Jewish settlement of Alei Sinai, residents with a newly harsh sense of vulnerability picked through the debris of their night of terror.

Two Palestinian commandos armed with assault rifles and grenades invaded their quiet community on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip late Tuesday, killing two Israelis--a 19-year-old soldier and her visiting boyfriend--and wounding 15 soldiers and settlers before being killed by Israeli snipers.

“Palestinians attack, and we keep silent, until now we pay the price,” Itzhak Gabai, an electrician, said at an Alei Sinai house seized by the gunmen before they were killed. Glass shards littered the floor, large-caliber bullet holes pocked the walls, and a bloody ammunition vest was cast aside in the backyard. “We feel like sheep to the slaughter.”

The raid by militants of the radical Islamic organization Hamas was one of the most brazen yet on a settlement and prompted the Israeli retaliation on Beit Lahiya.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, meeting in the wee hours of Wednesday, announced that it was reverting to “pre-cease-fire” policies that included the targeted killings of suspects and incursions into Palestinian territory.

That seemed to effectively end the cease-fire announced by the Palestinians and Israel last month and formalized Sept. 26 by Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Hard-liners in Sharon’s government were urging him to go to war against the Palestinian Authority, while more moderate politicians on both sides were looking for ways to salvage some semblance of a truce.

Even before the events of Tuesday and Wednesday, the cease-fire existed mostly in name. A total of 27 Palestinians and two Israelis were killed in the week following the Arafat-Peres meeting, and there had been dozens of shootings and one small car bomb set by another radical Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad.

On Wednesday afternoon, Palestinian gunmen opened fire on Jews praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of Hebron, especially crowded for the Jewish Sukkot holiday. Two women were injured, the army said. Late Wednesday, two Israelis were wounded when their car came under fire on a road near French Hill, on Jerusalem’s northern outskirts.

In Jerusalem, Daniel Ayalon, a senior policy advisor to Sharon, sidestepped the issue of whether the government has formally abandoned the cease-fire.

“Unfortunately, it seems like the cease-fire never took hold,” Ayalon said. “Since the meeting of Peres and Arafat, we didn’t have a moment of quiet.”

Arafat, he said, is unwilling “to go after the terrorists. He has the capabilities, with his tens of thousands of police, to break the force of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which is just a couple of hundred men, but he does not do it.”

U.S. officials and senior Palestinian officials insisted that the cease-fire was still alive. A lessening of the violence is critical to Bush administration attempts to forge an alliance that would include Arab states in retaliating against those behind the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and near Washington.

Until Tuesday night’s settlement raid, “We had three days of quiet, and we’re trying to do our best,” Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said. “We have a political opposition that is trying to sabotage our effort, and then, of course, we have the majority of the Israeli government and the Israeli military trying to sabotage it.”

For those living the conflict at ground level, however, there was little doubt that the cease-fire was dead and more bloodshed inevitable. The two sides remain trapped in a cycle of revenge and retaliation, undeterred by shifting global dynamics and impervious to outside touches of diplomacy.

“Cease-fire?” said Gabai, the electrician in Alei Sinai. “Every night when I go to sleep, I wake up to shooting. I don’t even need an alarm clock.”

His comments were echoed by a Palestinian resident of Beit Lahiya, teacher Abdullah Shaheen, for whom the cease-fire also had been a sham. “The Jews are killing us every day,” Shaheen, 32, said as he stood outside his brother’s market. “Shooting, the tanks . . . we cannot sleep at night.”

His cousin, Khaled, a government office worker, said a permanent political solution will never be found between two peoples who so hate each other and whose conflict is visceral and spans issues from land to religion to the economy.

“The motives igniting the explosion of the situation are more powerful than the motives for settling the situation,” he said.

The attack on the settlement also exposed the fact that Arafat is either unable, or unwilling, to crack down on Hamas and the other radical factions, whose popularity has soared in the last year of fighting.

Arafat would need to rein in the extremists to make any truce work and to demonstrate his support for the U.S.-declared war on terrorism. But challenging such popular groups poses political risks for Arafat and could trigger an internal blood bath.

Abdulaziz Rantisi, a leader of Hamas, said Arafat will not dare arrest him or other Islamic militants, despite intense pressure from the U.S. and Europe, not to mention Israel.

“It would be against the will of the Palestinians, and no one can prevent reactions from the Palestinians,” said Rantisi, whose organization has vowed to continue its campaign of suicide bombings that have killed dozens in the past.

Rantisi was interviewed in the teeming Jabaliya refugee camp underneath a “mourning tent” at the wake for the two young Palestinians who staged the incursion into Alei Sinai. Hundreds of boys and young men turned out for the funeral of the men, who were saluted as “heroes.” Elsewhere in Gaza, crowds marching to other funerals chanted support for alleged terrorism mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Back in Alei Sinai, Gabai and other residents confronted a visiting Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer. “Where is security?” Gabai demanded. “You have done nothing for us!” The residents had just returned from the funeral for Liron Harpaz, the woman killed in the raid.

Ben-Eliezer had little to say in response. Later, he told reporters that Israel will not return to negotiations with the Palestinians until Arafat “has terrorism under control.”

Wilkinson reported from the Gaza Strip and Curtius from Jerusalem.