Israeli Forces Storm Into 2 Palestinian Refugee Camps

Backed by tanks and helicopters, Israeli forces waged a major, risky assault on two Palestinian refugee camps Thursday, conducting house-to-house searches and battling gunmen who vowed to fight to the death.

The mission to break Palestinian militant strongholds marked the first time in years that Israel had invaded a refugee camp, and it triggered some of the fiercest combat yet in 17 months of conflict.

Israel said the densely populated Balata camp, in the West Bank city of Nablus, and the nearby Jenin camp are “hotbeds of terrorism” where Palestinian militants train, make weapons, take shelter and plot attacks on Israelis.

For Israel, entering Balata, a teeming warren of cramped cinder-block homes and narrow streets where at least 20,000 Palestinians live, was always a red line, a threshold that few would have predicted the government would cross. The layout of the decades-old camp is more conducive to the guerrilla warfare that Palestinian militants wage than the conventional operations of Israel’s mechanized army. The risk of heavy losses has always been considered high.

The offensive began late Wednesday, and fighting continued to rage early today in Balata, where Israeli forces had seized control of many buildings, and in Jenin, 25 miles to the north, where troops met stiff resistance as they moved deeper into the camp. Palestinian fighters vowed revenge and carried out shooting attacks on Jewish communities throughout the West Bank and near Jerusalem. That led to Israeli retaliation.

At least 13 Palestinians were killed in Balata and Jenin and more than 100 wounded. One Israeli soldier, a member of an elite paratroop reconnaissance squad, was also killed in Balata. Scores of Palestinian civilians fled the camps or hunkered down, stockpiling food and bracing for worse.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher urged that “the utmost restraint be exercised to avoid harm to the civilian population. These are heavily populated areas.”

The surge in violence sidelined a fledgling Saudi peace initiative that had been gaining momentum. Palestinians accused Israel of attacking the camps to undermine the land-for-peace proposal.

Balata on Thursday was ringed by tanks and engulfed in clouds of black smoke from the burning tires that camp residents placed in the roads alongside concrete chunks and hulks of cars as barricades. The main Market Road was pitted with grapefruit-sized holes, apparently from Israeli helicopter fire. Palestinian gunmen crouched around corners. Every storefront was shuttered.

“The camp is effectively under [Israeli military] control,” Col. Avi Kochavi, head of the paratroop brigade carrying out the operation, told reporters in a briefing at a command post west of Nablus. “It’s completely surrounded, and we are in commanding positions.”

The Balata camp, the largest in the West Bank, has long been a bastion of Palestinian militancy--so tough and independent that even Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat has had trouble asserting control over camp leaders.

But Kochavi said less conventional tactics than the army commonly uses had given his men mobility, allowing them to seize key intersections and buildings with minimal casualties and carry out an extensive search for weapons and suspects.

Israeli forces began taking up positions near Balata last week, when they cut off the main road into Nablus. Late Wednesday, tanks were bearing down on the camp, and around midnight, helicopter gunships fired two missiles into an electrical transformer, plunging the area into darkness.

The invasion began. In a blaze of gunfire, elite special forces dressed in black swept into several apartment buildings and a United Nations-run boys school. Palestinian gunmen answered helicopter fire with bursts from automatic weapons and explosives.

Hospitals were overwhelmed with scores of casualties. “Anyone who left his home could get shot,” said Ghassan Awad, a 36-year-old ambulance driver who had hauled out six of the wounded by 8:30 a.m. One later died. The injured included women and children as well as gunmen, he said.

The soldiers set up an observation post at the U.N. school, perched on high ground with a vantage point over the entire camp. Palestinians tried to lay siege to the school, and they and the Israelis traded fire for hours.

“We will not surrender,” proclaimed Maged al Masri, a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia affiliated with Arafat’s Fatah movement that essentially runs Balata. “We will fight until death. We will send the soldiers to [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in coffins.”

Throughout the day, troops conducted house-to-house searches. To avoid exposure to enemy fire, they blew holes in the walls of adjacent homes so they could move from one to the next without going outside.

At noon, the army announced that it would give civilians three hours to leave the camp if they desired. “We strongly suggested they leave, for their safety,” an army spokeswoman said.

In the hour before the grace period ended, dozens of people, mostly women tugging children, hurried from the camp and onto the debris-strewn streets of Nablus.

“Everyone is leaving,” said Shifa Smajil, her two daughters and her husband’s other wife in tow. “There’s been shooting all night, and we really don’t know what’s happening. I’m very afraid.”

But Mohammed and Jamila Ibrahim and their 11 children were having none of it. “Where would we go?” Jamila asked, dressed in a velour housecoat and tucked in an alley. “We left in ‘48, we left in ‘67,” she said, referring to Israel’s War of Independence and the Middle East War, when huge numbers of Palestinians fled their homes. “We will die in our home. We will not leave again.”

As she spoke, another barrage of gunfire sounded. A shout went up. A young man fell wounded. Others grabbed him from the street, blood gushing from a leg wound, and rushed him to a battery of waiting ambulances, their red lights flashing and sirens wailing.

After nightfall, shooting from helicopters resumed, allowing Israeli forces to advance deeper into the camp. Early today, at least three more Palestinians were wounded as troops and armored vehicles moved deeper into Jenin, with helicopters hovering overhead, according to residents reached by telephone. Fierce gun battles raged before dawn and calls for the residents to defend their homes were sounded from loudspeakers.

Since the worst Israeli-Palestinian fighting in decades erupted in September 2000, Israel has shelled targets in refugee camps, mostly in the Gaza Strip, and has repeatedly invaded cities and towns. But never have troops come so close to hand-to-hand combat in the alleyways of an angry, hostile refugee camp.

“The operation shows . . . no place is off-limits for the Israeli army,” Kochavi told reporters.

Hostilities between Israel and Balata militants date back to the early days of the current conflict, when Israeli troops were forced to retreat from Joseph’s Tomb, a shrine in Nablus, under almost constant attack by the militants. An Israeli soldier bled to death when his comrades couldn’t rescue him.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Thursday that Balata militants were launching suicide bombers “every day” and had to be stopped. “The Palestinians must not think that the camps are safe havens,” he said.

The Israeli military clearly had Thursday’s operation on the drawing board for some time. The tactics are classic Sharon, reminiscent of the steps he took as a military commander to “cleanse” the Gaza Strip of Palestinians he judged to be terrorists in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“This is complete madness,” said opposition leader Yossi Sarid of the leftist Meretz Party. “Someone burnt badly in the past in Sabra and Chatila must be very careful in the present in Balata and Jenin. Nothing good can come from yet another escalation. . . . This is bad, very bad.”

Sabra and Chatila were Palestinian refugee camps near Beirut where Christian Phalangists killed hundreds of people during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Sharon, who was defense minister at the time, controlled the area, and an official Israeli investigation held him indirectly responsible for failing to stop the massacre.

Palestinian militants vowed revenge to the Balata and Jenin operations and later opened fire on Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood on land Israel captured in the 1967 war and considers part of Jerusalem. Four people were injured and 20 buildings damaged, Israeli authorities said. Israel fired missiles at the nearby Palestinian town of Beit Jala in response.