Raid on Gaza Camp Leaves Anger Behind

BUREIJ REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip -- The simple home where elementary school teacher Ahlam Kandeel lived with her husband and three children was a house of mourning Friday, filled with women weeping over her death in an Israeli army raid on this crowded Palestinian refugee camp.

Kandeel, 31, who taught mathematics in a United Nations-administered school, was one of 10 Palestinians killed when the camp became a battleground before dawn Friday, in a three-hour confrontation that pitted Israeli troops, tanks and helicopter gunships against Palestinian gunmen who poured withering fire on the Israelis.

Nearly 24 hours later, the two sides were locked in bitter argument over the nature of the casualties in the Bureij camp, an enclave of rutted, sandy streets and close-packed cinderblock houses in the central Gaza Strip that is home to about 30,000 people.

The Israeli army said that nearly all those killed were gun-wielding combatants; Palestinian officials insisted that most were innocents caught in the cross-fire.

As is often the case in the ongoing conflict here, the truth probably lies somewhere between the two versions of events.

Kandeel was the only woman among the dead. The others were all men in their 20s and 30s. One of them, Osama Tahrawi, worked for the U.N. refugee agency as a janitor.

Adding to the confusion, the militant group Hamas claimed six of the dead as its own, and a list later carried by Lebanon’s Al-Manara TV station included the names of Kandeel and Tahrawi. However, Hamas and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority are feuding, and Hamas might have wished to enhance its prestige by claiming an affiliation with more of the confrontation’s victims.

Two of the men killed were identified by the Palestinians as policemen. Ten other people were injured, including an 11-year-old girl.

In many ways, the raid typified the grinding urban warfare that has become a routine feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent months.

All over the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has been mounting lightning strikes, usually carried out in the dead of night, on Palestinian cities, towns and refugee camps, generally targeting only a few fugitive militants, or even a lone wanted man.

The Israeli army describes the operations as “pinpoint” strikes, and sometimes soldiers do manage to capture or kill their quarry without encountering resistance or harming anyone else.

But what happened in Bureij was a graphic illustration of how difficult it is for Palestinian civilians living in crowded neighborhoods to stay out of harm’s way when fighting breaks out on their doorsteps, with both sides using weapons designed for the battlefield.

Israel said that in Friday’s firefight, Palestinians employed antitank missiles and assault rifles; the army used tank shells and helicopter-fired missiles.

Coming as it did on the first morning of the celebratory feast of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the raid provoked an outpouring of Palestinian fury. Arafat, speaking to journalists in the West Bank city of Ramallah, called it a massacre.

Israeli army spokeswoman Capt. Sharon Feingold defended the timing of the strike.

“They don’t respect our holidays,” she said, referring to attacks on Jewish holy days by Palestinian militants.

“When we have the intelligence we need to move, we do so.”

As is always the case when Palestinians die in confrontations with Israeli soldiers, funeral observances had martial overtones.

Large contingents of armed, masked militants marched among tens of thousands of mourners who packed the camp’s narrow streets, waving green Hamas flags, hailing the dead as martyrs to the Palestinian cause and vowing revenge on Israel.

Displays of private and personal grief were reserved for later, at family gatherings. At Kandeel’s house, men congregated in a mourning tent set up outside, while the women were sequestered indoors, according to tradition.

“She was a kind and friendly person, loved by everyone,” said the dead woman’s tearful mother-in-law, Fatima Kandeel. Weeping sisters described how Kandeel had been a surrogate mother to her own siblings after their mother died.

Kandeel, her husband, Mohammed, and their three children -- two boys, 4 and 2, and a 7-month-old girl -- lived on the top floor of the four-story family home.

On Friday, 33-year-old Mohammed Kandeel walked through the apartment for the first time since the chaotic hours before dawn, sobbing as he saw a trail of bloody footprints on the tile floor, left by his wife after bullets shattered a window and struck her in the head and chest.

“Don’t clean them up, these footprints,” Kandeel begged the women of his family. “They are all that I have left of her.”

The Israeli troops had been hunting Palestinian militant Ayman Shasniyeh, who the army said had helped engineer a roadside bomb that blew up an Israeli Merkava battle tank in March, killing three soldiers. They failed to find him but demolished his home with explosives after ordering his wife and three children outside.