Israeli Army Targets West Bank City

The Israeli army, using helicopter gunships and more than 100 armored vehicles, shut down this Palestinian city Friday, leaving three people dead in a retaliatory strike after the bombing of a Jerusalem university cafeteria.

Israeli officials said the military operation was also intended to round up local militants and destroy bomb factories located in Nablus’ Old City, or casbah. The roundup could take several days as troops make door-to-door searches along the casbah’s narrow alleyways, which are likely to be lined with booby traps, said a senior Israeli commander here. A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces said that two bomb factories have been discovered and that one contained a Kassam rocket, which has a range of about five miles.

The military operation came two days after a bomb was detonated inside a crowded Hebrew University cafeteria, killing seven people, five of them Americans. The Islamic group Hamas said the bombing was in retaliation for an Israeli air attack last week that killed the leader of its military wing and 14 others, mostly children.

In the last several days, the people of Nablus, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank, have refused to adhere to a strict Israeli-imposed curfew that has been in effect for more than a month. They opened shops and took to the streets, attempting to return to a semblance of normality despite Israeli sanctions imposed on seven of the eight major West Bank cities in June after back-to-back suicide bombings.

But on Friday, this city of 135,000 people was eerily deserted, save for a few adventurous children who dashed out into the street to play soccer, listening for the sound of approaching Israeli armored personnel carriers.

Armored vehicles surrounded the Old City, and by late afternoon, about 50 Palestinians had been arrested. The Israeli army had not entered the casbah in force since April, when it was the scene of bloody gun battles.

Outside Nablus, in the village of Salem, troops surrounded the home of Hamas activist Amjad Jubur, and shot and killed him when he tried to escape, Israeli officials said. At least two other Palestinians were shot to death in the Old City.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat called the Israeli operation “a new massacre” while Israeli government spokesman Dore Gold said the reason for the incursion was that Nablus had replaced nearby Jenin as a hub for plotting suicide bombings.

“We are dealing with a new generation of terrorists, which sprang up relatively recently under the leadership of their more seasoned cohorts,” said the Israeli military commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

At Rafidia Hospital in the heart of Nablus, an ambulance arrived carrying the body of a young man who had been shot in the head during the Israeli operation.

“Look at him,” ambulance driver Said Aker said angrily. “He was just sitting in his house. He’s wearing his pajamas.”

Husam Jawhari, the hospital director, said that in some cases it took more than an hour and a half to get the wounded to the hospital. “People were making telephone calls and begging someone to come help them,” he said.

On the third floor of the hospital, Wisam Shaheen, 42, was recovering from surgery to remove a bullet from her chest. Her 22-year-old son, Majdi, also had been shot and had narrowly survived his operation. Shaheen said she and her son went to their balcony as soon as the shooting started to see what was happening.

“As soon as we came out, they started shooting at us,” she said, her body covered with a wrinkled blue sheet. “I screamed, ‘My chest, my chest!’ when I was shot, and my son was crying as well. There was shooting in all directions. We called for an ambulance, but they couldn’t come.”

Shaheen said her son works in a different town and arrived for a visit the evening before the Israeli incursion.

“It was his fate,” she said.

In the Gaza Strip, an 85-year-old Palestinian woman died early Friday after being shot by Israeli soldiers who mistook her for a gunman trying to sneak up on a Jewish settlement.

An Israel Defense Forces spokesman said soldiers detected someone moving “suspiciously” in an area near the Kfar Darom settlement and opened fire. When the soldiers discovered it was an elderly woman, they took her to an Israeli hospital, where she died. The IDF expressed “extreme sorrow” over the death.

Meanwhile, the Israeli press reported that the commander of the Israeli forces on the West Bank, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Eitan, has signed orders to expel two relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers and that the Israeli attorney general had given his approval. If appeals fail, they will be expelled from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.

And at a tearful ceremony early Friday at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, the bodies of two of the American victims of the university bombing attack were flown to New York. The two wooden caskets held the bodies of Benjamin Blutstein, 25, of Susquehanna Township, Pa., and Janis Ruth Coulter, 36, of New York.

“Their lives are testimony to the values shared by the U.S. and Israel, lives of religious commitment and tolerance,” U.S. Ambassador Daniel C. Kurtzer said. “Terrorists cannot live by these values, so they murder beautiful young people.”