Israeli Troops Withdraw After Gaza Raid

The Israeli army pulled out of the Palestinian-controlled town of Beit Hanoun late Wednesday, after the most sweeping ground operation in the Gaza Strip since fighting began nearly 17 months ago.

Five Palestinian police officers were killed and 18 people were arrested in the raid, which Israel said was a response to Sunday’s launch of two rockets into the Negev desert by the militant Islamic group Hamas.

Although the homemade rockets fell in open fields, Israel described their use as an escalation of the conflict.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had vowed a different kind of military response, but the operation looked much like previous Israeli assaults on West Bank cities, fueling criticism that the government has neither a military nor a political solution to the conflict.

The operation began Tuesday night when the Israeli army seized three towns and a refugee camp with armored and infantry units. The troops withdrew from three of the areas early Wednesday but then took up fixed positions and conducted a house-to-house search in Beit Hanoun, a Hamas stronghold in the northern Gaza Strip.

Zohour Naieem, whose husband, Rezek, was arrested, said in a telephone interview that her house had been surrounded by Israeli armored vehicles.

“A lot of soldiers raided the house with dogs and searched every room,” she said. “They put me and the children in one room and my husband in another with his hands taped together. The children shouted and cried in panic.”

She insisted that her husband, a former construction worker in Israel, had no connection to any political group.

Israeli Brig. Gen. Israel Ziv said that many of those arrested were responsible for launching the Kassam-2 rockets and that weapons and intelligence were gathered in the operation. But Israeli television quoted security sources as saying that key people had escaped.

And the army sent a smaller force back into the central Gaza town of Deir al Balah early today after it said mortars were fired from there into Israel.

The army said the main goal of its Gaza operation was to find the manufacturing centers and launch sites for the 122-millimeter Kassam-2 rockets, which Hamas threatens to aim at Israeli cities in response to Israel’s aerial attacks on the Palestinian territories.

“The arrests we made, as well as other people rounded up, will help us piece together the picture and tighten the grip on this infrastructure of activists and, in my estimation, on the manufacturing infrastructure,” Ziv said.

Palestinian leaders countered that the only thing that will silence attacks on Israel is if the Jewish state ends its siege of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“If Israel wants to stop these attacks, it should withdraw from the Palestinian territories and return to the negotiating table,” said Jihad Wazir, the Palestinian Authority’s deputy planning minister.

Israeli analysts said Wednesday that no one is putting forward a serious political or military blueprint for ending what has become a war of attrition--at least 843 Palestinians and 256 Israelis have been killed since September 2000--and that both sides are gradually escalating the cycle of attack and counterattack.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat has been confined to the West Bank city of Ramallah for more than two months while Israel has attacked his government and security installations. He remains unwilling or unable to control first suicide and now rocket attacks on Israel while Israel’s siege of the Palestinian territories continues.

Hard-liners in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s coalition government, meanwhile, have rejected European efforts to intercede, as well as a plan that Foreign Minister Shimon Peres crafted with Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Korei. Sharon has refused to negotiate with Arafat unless the Palestinian attacks stop.

“We bomb the same targets with the object of humiliating Arafat and forcing him to do something, which has no effect,” said Israeli strategic analyst Joseph Alpher.

“We move in, arrest and kill some people . . . but what we do has relatively little impact in terms of punishing, deterring or displaying force. We do not have a military response that will change the situation, and the Sharon government consciously avoids offering any political response,” Alpher said.

Likewise, he said, Arafat has not laid out a plan for “either military victory or for peace.”

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told Congress that Arafat did take one step the U.S. had sought: accepting responsibility on behalf of the Palestinian Authority for an attempt to smuggle in 50 tons of arms from Iran. But Arafat did not take personal responsibility and continued to deny prior knowledge of the smuggling.

Divisions within the Palestinian leadership appeared to open Tuesday when Arafat had a violent argument with his West Bank security chief, Col. Jibril Rajoub.

Rajoub tried to repair the damage with a pledge of loyalty published in Wednesday’s Palestinian daily newspaper Al Quds.

With the situation on the ground going from bad to worse, Avi Dichter, the chief of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, told a parliamentary committee Tuesday that the government should consider building physical barriers around Jerusalem and between Israel and the West Bank to reduce Palestinian terror attacks.

The idea of a physical separation between Israel and the Palestinian territories has been put forward by politicians, but this is the first time it has been proposed by a high-level security official. Sharon has rejected the idea as a de facto concession of the West Bank to the Palestinians.

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Special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Gaza City contributed to this report.