Deadly Chain Reaction in the Mideast

Israel attacked Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip this morning and killed at least 12 Palestinians after militants shot dead six soldiers in one of the bloodiest spates of violence since fighting erupted nearly 17 months ago.

The Palestinian Authority president, who has been confined to the West Bank city of Ramallah for more than two months by Israeli tanks, was unharmed when a gunship fired a missile into the headquarters of his military intelligence service. But Israel has never come closer to harming him.

The army reacted with rage to the attack on the soldiers, which military analysts described as a well-planned assault, at a roadblock northwest of Ramallah on Tuesday night. Officials vowed that revenge would be swift and on a different scale from past retaliations.

Before dawn today, the Israelis unleashed an air and naval bombardment in Gaza City. Palestinians said at least five guards were killed there. In a separate strike, soldiers entered the West Bank city of Nablus and killed at least seven Palestinians, six of them security officers, in gun battles, Palestinians said. The army had no immediate comment on the Nablus operation, but officials confirmed that troops had struck Arafat’s Gaza headquarters.

In a 24-hour period, 26 people have been killed.

“We have suffered 11 dead in 48 hours,” said Raanan Gissin, spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. “This looks more like a premeditated guerrilla war than sporadic terrorism. This cannot continue. There has to be a harsher response.”

Blockades Tightened

The roadblock attack came as the army was already stepping up retaliatory strikes against Palestinian targets and tightening blockades of Palestinian towns and villages in response to a wave of killings that has left Israelis reeling.

Israel Television broke into a nightly news broadcast largely devoted to the funerals of four Israelis killed in two attacks Monday to report Tuesday night’s deaths.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Arafat’s Fatah faction, and the militant movement Islamic Hamas both claimed responsibility. The two groups said they planned to focus their efforts on soldiers and Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli military intelligence officers said last week that Palestinian factions, encouraged by signs of dissent within Israeli society over the Sharon government’s policies, had decided to concentrate their attacks inside the West Bank and Gaza. The groups apparently hope to strengthen calls inside Israel for the army to pull out of those areas.

In January, a group of reserve combat officers and soldiers publicly declared its refusal to serve in the West Bank and Gaza because it considered the army’s behavior there immoral.

Over the weekend, 300 reserve officers from the army and intelligence services, calling themselves the Council for Peace and Security, announced that they would campaign for the government to immediately withdraw from all of the Gaza Strip and abandon 40 to 50 Jewish settlements to better defend Israel from Palestinian attacks and pave the way to a negotiated settlement.

The growing debate here over the army’s tactics and Sharon’s policies is sure to be deepened by what commentators said was the deadliest Palestinian assault on Israeli soldiers since 1987, when a gunman flying a hang glider from Lebanon killed six troops in northern Israel.

The army was already under fire from military analysts who accuse it of responding sluggishly to rapidly changing Palestinian tactics and making too many mistakes in the field recently.

Facing increasing criticism from the right and left for failing to achieve the security or the peace he promised voters when they swept him into office a year ago, Sharon on Monday gave the army a green light to intensify its retaliations.

Tuesday’s dizzying succession of attacks and counterattacks began before dawn as the army began carrying out Sharon’s instructions.

In Gaza, soldiers fired tank shells into the Khan Yunis refugee camp after a Palestinian militant tried to infiltrate the nearby Jewish settlement of Morag. Three Palestinians, including a woman and her 10-year-old daughter, were killed when the shells hit their homes, Palestinians said.

Hamas Office Hit

Later in the day, Israeli helicopters hit a Hamas office in the Jabaliya refugee camp near Gaza City, killing two Hamas members and critically wounding a 9-year-old girl, according to Palestinians. Warplanes struck a building belonging to Arafat’s presidential guard, Force 17, and another building housing Palestinian military intelligence in Rafah in southern Gaza, injuring three Palestinian police officers.

In Ramallah, F-16s hit a building of the Palestinian police. No injuries were reported.

Also in the West Bank, two Palestinians were shot to death when Israeli troops raided the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, and in Gaza, troops killed a Palestinian gunman near the Netzer Hazani settlement, the army said.

The Israeli raids failed to deter Palestinian attacks. In the early evening, a Palestinian suicide bomber tried to board an Israeli bus traveling through the Jordan Valley, in the West Bank, but was pushed out the door by the suspicious bus driver. The Palestinian, who police said was wearing a belt packed with explosives, blew up in the street. No one else was injured in that incident. The attack on the roadblock followed soon after.

Israel Radio reported that the Tuesday night attack began when an unknown number of Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a prefabricated building sheltering soldiers at a roadblock outside the village of Ein Arik, northwest of Ramallah, about 8 p.m. Of the eight soldiers inside the structure, six were killed, one was wounded and another escaped unharmed. All the gunmen escaped.

In a statement Tuesday night, Hamas said three of its militants attacked the army roadblock post in retaliation for the Israeli airstrike on the Hamas office in the Jabaliya camp.

In a phone call to Al Manar, the television station of the militant Islamic Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, a spokesman for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade also claimed responsibility for the attack on the soldiers.

Speaking to reporters in Ramallah, Marwan Barghouti, leader of Fatah’s Tanzim militia in the West Bank, praised the raid on the roadblock and promised that more such attacks would soon follow.