Israel Raids Gaza as Criticism Grows

Israeli warplanes struck a security compound in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday night, killing a Palestinian policeman and wounding 25 people, Palestinian authorities said. The raid came a day after three Israeli soldiers died in the same area when a powerful mine blew apart their heavily armored tank.

Earlier Friday, the Israeli army confirmed that the commander of an elite unit had died in what it called a freak accident during a predawn raid on a West Bank village. Lt. Col. Eyal Weiss, who was crushed by a collapsing wall, was the highest-ranking commanding officer to die in 16 1/2 months of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.

The loss of an officer, three soldiers and a Merkava-3 tank in less than 24 hours was a blow to an army that finds itself increasingly criticized for the tactics it is using against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Politicians and military analysts have called the army slow, clumsy and too bureaucratic. And in a growing protest movement, more than 200 reserve combat soldiers and officers have said they will no longer serve in the West Bank and Gaza because they consider the army’s behavior there immoral.

Israeli voters also are expressing discontent with their government. In a poll published Friday in the daily Maariv newspaper, 49% of 590 respondents said they felt that the “national leadership has lost control of the security situation,” while 44% said it has not lost control and 7% said they didn’t know.

Political analyst Hemi Shalev wrote in Maariv that the poll indicates that Israelis are in a state of “steadily growing confusion” about a conflict that appears to have neither a political nor a military solution. A majority of those polled--54%--said they are dissatisfied with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s performance on security issues. But 48% said they believe that Israel is winning in the clash with the Palestinians.

Shalev called it “frightening” that 35% of those polled said Israel should transfer--expel--Palestinian residents from the West Bank and Gaza to Arab countries.

“But perhaps what is more serious and more dangerous is the public feeling that there is no one at home, that the ship is being tossed in a stormy sea and that its captain is out of ideas,” Shalev wrote. “This is an extreme situation that could even lead to seeking extreme solutions.”

The national sense of gloom deepened Friday after the commander of the army’s Central Command, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Eitan, detailed Weiss’ death at a Tel Aviv news conference. The 34-year-old commander headed Duvdevan, the undercover unit whose troops often wear disguises in carrying out special operations.

Early Friday morning, the unit entered the Palestinian-controlled village of Pzeita, near Tulkarm, looking for a suspected local leader of Islamic Jihad, a militant group that has carried out a string of suicide bombings inside Israel.

The army said it had cornered Jasser Abdel Radad in a three-story house and began demolishing the building with bulldozers after he refused to surrender. When Radad threw down his weapon and emerged, Weiss took him behind a concrete wall across the street for interrogation as the demolition continued, Eitan said.

“At one point, when the tractor was completing its work, part of the house, either from the ceiling or from a wall, flew across the road and struck the wall behind which the unit commander was standing,” Eitan said. Weiss was killed instantly, he said, in what he called “first-class bad luck.” Radad was unharmed.

Hours later, Israeli warplanes launched the Gaza raid, in the second phase of retaliation for the attack on the tank Thursday. Tanks and bulldozers had already rumbled into the area Friday morning, demolishing police posts and crops, Palestinians reported.

Senior Israeli army officers said the Palestinians’ ability to destroy the sophisticated tank took them by surprise. The army will have to rethink its use of tanks to guard roads leading to Jewish settlements now that it knows Palestinian militants can blow them up, military analysts said.

The army’s second response came shortly after nightfall. F-16 fighter jets dropped what the Palestinians said were three bombs on one of the compounds of the Palestinian national security forces outside the Jabaliya refugee camp. Hours later, rescue crews were still digging for victims in the rubble, said Maj. Gen. Abdel Razek Majaydeh, chief of the Palestinian police in Gaza.

“There is nothing that justifies this escalation,” he said, “and it will bring the whole area into a cycle of violence that has no end.”