Palestinian Militants Bomb Tank; 3 Israeli Soldiers Die

A powerful explosion ripped apart an Israeli tank in the Gaza Strip on Thursday night, killing three soldiers and wounding another, an army spokesman said.

The attack by militant Palestinians came as politicians and military analysts criticized the army’s incursion into several Gazan towns a day earlier as a failure. In the broadest operation in Gaza since the outbreak of fighting 16 1/2 months ago, dozens of tanks and hundreds of troops had swept into northern Gazan towns with the stated mission of thwarting Palestinian missile attacks on Israeli communities.

Eighteen hours later, the forces pulled out, and on Thursday the army said it had released all but two of 18 Palestinians arrested during the operation.

“We can only pray that what we saw in the last 24 hours in Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya and Deir al Balah is not really the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]” of today, military analyst Alex Fishman wrote in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. “The real IDF is different: smarter, more creative and less clumsy.”

Unnamed senior army officers were quoted in the Israeli press as saying the government has exaggerated the importance of the Kassam-2 missiles developed by the Islamic militant group Hamas. The rockets, the sources said, are highly inaccurate and probably cannot do much damage. But by declaring that the missiles cross Israel’s “red lines,” the government has raised the stakes for retaliation, the officers complained.

Politicians criticized the army for allegedly taking too long to launch the Gaza incursion after Palestinians fired Kassam-2 rockets Sunday that, for the first time, landed inside Israel. The rockets caused no injuries. The lapse between the attack and the incursion allowed leading militants to escape, they said.

Thursday night’s ambush on the Israeli tank is likely to intensify the debate about army tactics and heighten tensions in the West Bank and Gaza.

The violence began when Palestinians opened fire on a convoy guarded by soldiers that was traveling to the isolated Jewish settlement of Netzarim, in northwestern Gaza, army spokesman Jacob Dallal said.

The army controls the main roads leading to settlements, which are home to about 5,000 Israelis living in heavily guarded compounds surrounded by more than 1 million Palestinians.

A roadside charge exploded next to an armored bus in the convoy but caused no injuries. Reinforcements then rushed to the scene, including the tank.

Dallal said “a huge explosion” rocked the tank, destroying it and killing three of its crew members. The attack was the first time “that we’ve encountered something that could do this to a tank” in the West Bank or Gaza, Dallal said. Authorities early today said an antitank mine was used.

He likened the attack to the sophisticated, deadly assaults carried out against Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite Muslim militia, during Israel’s 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon.

In a statement faxed to news agencies, the Popular Resistance Committees claimed responsibility for the attack. The group is an umbrella organization of militants from Palestinian factions linked by their commitment to armed attacks on Israelis.

The statement said the group was retaliating for Israel’s incursion the day before and for the deaths of five Palestinian security officers during the Israeli operation.

“We exploded two big bombs when a Zionist convoy, including a settler bus, was passing on the main road” between Netzarim and the Karni crossing on the border between Gaza and pre-1967 Israel, the statement said. It ended with a phrase borrowed from Israeli military statements issued after operations: “All our fighters returned safely to base.”

Palestinians in the Netzarim area reported Israeli helicopters circling overhead and said soldiers were firing flares into the sky long after the dead and wounded were evacuated in armored ambulances. Dallal confirmed that troops were searching the area for the attackers.

The ambush came as two European diplomats were shuttling between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, trying to generate interest in implementing a cease-fire. British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer were in Jerusalem for high-level talks, but neither man was able to meet with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whom doctors confined to his Negev desert farm this week after he came down with the flu.

The two foreign ministers emphasized their concurrence with the Bush administration that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat must rein in militants so that negotiations can resume.

“The first steps that have to be taken are to make the life of the people of Israel much more secure, and that means clamping down on terrorism which comes from the occupied territories,” Straw told reporters after meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

Meanwhile, the army said this morning that its forces entered the Palestinian-controlled village of Pzeita in the northern West Bank and killed one Palestinian who had opened fire on them.