Battle in Bethlehem Echoes Beirut

This picturesque town of steepled churches and souvenir shops, revered by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus, is beginning to feel like the strife-torn Beirut of the 1980s.

The United States and the European Union stepped up efforts Sunday to rein in Israel’s widest military campaign against the Palestinians in years, and Israeli leaders insisted that they are not reoccupying Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank. But on the ground, it looks like war.

As Israeli troops tightened their hold on six West Bank towns, the heaviest fighting was here. At least four Palestinians were killed in gun battles that raged between troops and Palestinian fighters for a fourth day. A total of 15 Palestinians have died in the Bethlehem area since Thursday. Dozens have been wounded. Several Israeli soldiers also have been wounded.

Leaders ranging from the pope to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell appealed to the two sides for calm, but Israel said the troops will stay until Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat meets demands to hand over the men who assassinated a far-right Israeli Cabinet minister last week and to dismantle Palestinian militias.

The demands had not been met, but late Sunday the Palestinian Authority did issue a statement in the Gaza Strip outlawing the military wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestine Liberation Organization faction that said it killed hard-line Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi in revenge for Israel’s Aug.27 assassination of the PFLP’s leader, Mustafa Zibri. Israel said Zibri was responsible for attacks on Israeli civilians.

Speaking in Rome on Sunday, Pope John Paul II expressed sorrow for the death Saturday of Johnny Thalgiyeh, a 19-year-old who may have been hit by a stray bullet as he stood outside a souvenir shop in Manger Square.

“War and death arrived even on the square of the Basilica of the Nativity of Our Lord,” the pope said in his noon prayer at the Vatican. “Violence is for everybody only a path of death and destruction which dishonors the holiness of God and the dignity of man.”

The Holy Land, the pope said, should be “a land of peace and fraternity once again.”

Thalgiyeh’s funeral was held Sunday a few dozen yards from where he was killed, in the Church of the Nativity, built on the site where Christians believe Mary swaddled the newborn Jesus in a manger. The sweet scent of incense and the sound of quiet weeping filled the dimly lighted church as Greek Orthodox priests led several hundred mourners in prayer over Thalgiyeh’s flower-strewn coffin.

Outside, clusters of heavily armed gunmen kept up running battles with Israeli troops and tanks in Bethlehem’s narrow streets in scenes eerily reminiscent of Lebanon’s capital during that country’s long civil war and Israel’s 1982 invasion.

Here, as in Beirut, gunmen clad in fatigues roamed streets littered with the carcasses of burned-out cars and blocked with boulders and debris. The crack of gunfire, punctuated by the louder boom of tank shells, was a constant backdrop to conversation. Palestinians said at least one shell fell near the Church of the Nativity and another close to Beit Jala Government Hospital.

Israeli troops have even taken up positions in multistory hotels here, just as gunmen took over hotels along Beirut’s beachfront. And soldiers have turned private homes on strategic hilltops into command posts. At one such home, still neatly landscaped with potted palms, camouflage nets hung Sunday from the second-story windows and an armored personnel carrier was parked in the driveway.

Both sides seemed to be thinking of their shared bloody past in Beirut and wondering whether they are beginning to replay Israel’s invasion and subsequent expulsion of Arafat and his fighters. Just as he did when the Israelis surrounded him in Beirut, Arafat appealed for international intervention Sunday, phoning U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and seeking a Security Council meeting.

In Israel, restive Labor Party members of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s coalition government vowed they would not be party to a new Israeli war of choice, as the invasion of Lebanon was called.

“We are very close to a brink,” said Culture, Science and Sports Minister Matan Vilnai, a retired general. “Maybe we are going to cross it. It is the brink of a Lebanon-style operation. I hope we will be clever enough and smart enough to examine the situation and not to cross this red line.”

In another echo of the Lebanon invasion, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres reportedly told close aides that he felt he had been lied to about the scope of the Israeli army’s incursion into Palestinian-controlled territories.

Peres’ comment recalled Sharon’s controversial role as defense minister during the Lebanon invasion. Then, the Labor Party supported the Likud Party government’s decision to invade. But later, Labor leaders and Cabinet ministers said Sharon had misled them, telling them that the army would thrust just “40 kilometers” into Lebanese territory. Instead, invading forces drove all the way to Beirut, and Israel remained bogged down in the country for two decades.

Apparently stung by Peres’ allusion, Sharon read a copy of last week’s government decision to a Cabinet meeting Sunday and said Israel is not escalating its conflict with the Palestinians. Peres was not present. He had flown to New York, where he assured Annan that Israel will not reconquer the West Bank and will not topple Arafat. The dovish foreign minister is scheduled to deliver the same message this week to Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials during talks in Washington.

But in a front-page editorial in the mass-circulation daily Yediot Aharonot, political commentator Sever Plotzker wrote that Israel is at war with the Palestinian Authority.

“The area of real Palestinian Authority control in Judea and Samaria [the biblical names of the West Bank] has been reduced to the size of isolated and unconnected lots,” Plotzker wrote. “In fact, the Palestinian Authority has already been toppled both from within and from without. Anarchy and blockades have replaced it.”

Labor Party members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, are scheduled to meet today to decide what might trigger their exodus from Sharon’s broad-based government.

Powell telephoned Sharon and Arafat on Sunday and reportedly urged both to find a way back to negotiations. Also Sunday, European Union envoys Javier Solana and Miguel Angel Moratinos arrived in Israel for what European diplomats said will be an intensive, weeklong effort to get talks started.

Diplomatic solutions seemed remote, however, at Beit Jala Government Hospital. By early afternoon, staff members were moving patients into the hallways as machine-gun fire and shelling from Israeli tanks intensified nearby. Dr. Peter Qumri, the hospital’s director, moved from his office with windows facing the street into his secretary’s cubbyhole.

“I think it is halas --finished,” Qumri said. “This peace process was an experiment done by the leadership, and they have to say now, ‘Sorry, we didn’t succeed.”’

After nightfall, a 28-year-old man standing outside the hospital’s emergency room entrance was shot dead, a hospital spokesman reported. It was the third death of the day in Bethlehem and surrounding villages.