Israel Strikes Palestinian Compound in Gaza

Israel launched a second day of retaliatory airstrikes on the Gaza Strip on Monday, attacking a security compound housing imprisoned Islamic militants as politicians debated how best to respond to the Palestinians’ first use of a new rocket.

Right-wing ministers clamored for the government to oust Yasser Arafat and destroy his Palestinian Authority. But Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer backed away from earlier warnings that Israel would respond massively to the use of the Kassam-2 rocket.

“I said that it would be hard to put up with this,” Ben-Eliezer said of the rockets, whose range of roughly five miles makes them a threat to cities in the heart of Israel’s coastal plain. “The meaning of this is that we’ll try to deal with this in various ways--intelligence, interception and operations” to destroy suspected missile factories, Ben-Eliezer told a committee of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

The target Monday was a large, walled quarter of Gaza City known as the Saraya compound, headquarters of the Palestinian military intelligence and general security service.

Apache helicopters carried out Monday’s first strike shortly before noon as the morning session of the school day ended and the afternoon session began. Hundreds of schoolchildren were on streets crowded with pedestrians when the first missiles slammed into the compound.

As people scattered in panic, a pillar of black smoke rose high above the burning complex. Rescue workers and others rushed to the scene, only to dive for cover when Israeli fighter jets swooped in, firing a second round of missiles. Palestinians reported that several of the compound’s buildings were set ablaze.

Officials at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City reported that 37 people were injured. Many were hit by flying glass and other shrapnel, including Denver photographer George Kocheniec and two other journalists.

Hundreds of angry Gazans converged on the compound and demanded the release of prisoners kept there, many of them affiliated with the militant Islamic group Hamas. Palestinian police fired in the air to drive the mob back. Police sources later said they moved some prisoners to keep them safe from further Israeli attacks.

U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher criticized Israel’s bombing in populated areas, warning that it could intensify the fighting.

In the West Bank, relatives of prisoners held in a Hebron jail stormed the building Monday, freeing an unknown number of detainees. Palestinian police reportedly did not resist the assault.

The airstrikes in Gaza were a familiar Israeli response to a Palestinian attack; the same security compound has been hit before. Although Monday’s strikes were unusual because they were carried out midday, they were not the sort of dramatic, conflict-transforming retaliation that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Ben-Eliezer had said would come if the Palestinians dared to use the Kassam-2.

One reason for the relatively limited Israeli response may be that the rockets fired Sunday fell into a field in the Negev desert, causing no injuries and little damage. The Israeli warnings have mostly focused on what would happen if the Palestinians hit an Israeli town or city.

But military analyst Alex Fishman, writing in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, offered another explanation. Israel’s hand, he said, “is not free,” because the Bush administration has warned Sharon against escalating the fight with the Palestinians as the United States considers how to deal with Iraq. President Bush has labeled Iraq part of the “axis of evil” that the U.S. intends to tackle in its war on terrorism.

“Bush will not let anyone set the region ablaze and undermine the messianic task that he has taken upon himself, to root out evil from the world in general and from Iraq in particular,” Fishman wrote.

But if Ben-Eliezer hinted that Israel will limit, for now, its response to the threat from the Kassam-2 rockets, other Cabinet ministers called for all-out war on the Palestinian Authority.

“Our final goal should be to destroy the Palestinian Authority’s military capability and to break the terrorists’ and the Palestinian leadership’s will to fight us,” said Uzi Landau, public security minister. “These things will be achieved through our continuous, extensive and unrestricted action.”

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon’s chief rival in the Likud Party, told Israel Television that Sharon’s policies have failed.

“We must exact a price,” Netanyahu said in an interview Sunday. “If you get rid of this regime, you are telling the person who comes next, ‘Watch out.’ ”

Netanyahu said that Sharon “is doing too little too slowly.” The only solution to nearly 17 months of fighting with the Palestinians, Netanyahu said, is “a military solution.”

Hamas, which has developed the Kassam-2 and is thought to be behind the deployment of the rockets in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The militant group remained defiant Monday. “All settlements and many cities will come under Kassam fire,” the group boasted on its Web site. “Settlers should leave before they face the first strikes of the Kassam missiles.”

Retaliation for use of the missiles began with Israeli airstrikes in Gaza on Sunday night. On Monday, Ben-Eliezer said Israel is also tightening its blockade of Palestinian towns and villages, which will further restrict the movements of Palestinian civilians.