7 Members of an Israeli Family Are Buried After Weekend Attacks

Anguished mourners buried seven members of the Nehmad family here Sunday, including three children, as the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched retaliatory airstrikes for a string of attacks that killed 21 Israelis over the weekend.

“The man who did this is not a human being. He is an animal,” Rishon Mayor Meir Nitzan cried out in a eulogy delivered before 3,000 people at the town’s cemetery.

Meanwhile, F-16 fighter jets and helicopters carried out limited airstrikes against Palestinian targets, killing four Palestinians in attacks on police stations, a military intelligence building and a checkpoint in the West Bank.

Early this morning, Israeli troops killed three Palestinians in Rafah, a Gaza Strip refugee camp on the border with Egypt. Palestinians said troops shot the Palestinians in clashes that erupted when tanks and troops entered the camp and demolished three houses. An army spokesman said one abandoned home was bulldozed as troops searched for cross-border tunnels, and troops fired when they came under fire.

Palestinians said one of two police stations hit in Ramallah was several hundred yards from the headquarters of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. He was not hurt, but a Palestinian policeman was killed. An Israeli army spokesman denied that there were airstrikes in Ramallah.

Sharon, under mounting pressure from both left and right to drastically alter his approach to the conflict, huddled with groups of ministers and security chiefs throughout the day. But he resisted the demands of right-wing ministers in his Cabinet that the Palestinian Authority be toppled and Arafat driven from Palestinian-controlled territory.

Late Sunday, the Israeli security Cabinet--Sharon and senior ministers--issued a statement saying it had approved a plan for action.

Israel will put “continuous military pressure on the Palestinian Authority and the terrorist organizations which aim to put the brakes on Palestinian terror,” the statement said.

Sources in the prime minister’s office said earlier Sunday that the government would step up its military operations but would not destroy the authority or harm Arafat. State-run Israel Radio quoted Sharon as telling his Cabinet that Israel faces a long fight with the Palestinians and that only military pressure will eventually force them back to the negotiating table.

Since his election a year ago, Sharon has insisted that he will conduct political negotiations with the Palestinians only if they halt all attacks on Israelis. As the toll of dead Israelis rises, however, opinion polls show his popularity sagging.

Although the public is demanding either a military or a political solution to the conflict, the partnership Sharon has forged with the center-left Labor Party makes it hard for him to deal a crushing blow to the Palestinian Authority. But his dependence on the right-wing parties that are the core of his government makes it difficult for him to seek a negotiated settlement while the violence continues.

For Israelis exhausted by more than 17 months of bloodshed, Sunday was another day of horror.

Bodies of the nine Israelis killed Saturday night in a suicide bombing in an ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood had not even been identified by forensic specialists, when a Palestinian gunman launched another devastating attack as Israelis began their workweek Sunday morning.

The gunman climbed a hill above a remote Israeli army checkpoint in the West Bank, then used a rifle to methodically gun down soldiers manning the roadblock, Jewish settlers waiting to pass through in their cars on their way to work and rescuers who arrived at the scene. Army investigators said he shot 30 times, killing the three soldiers at the checkpoint. An aged carbine he was thought to have used was found at the scene.

A commander who emerged from a structure at the checkpoint when the shooting started was also gunned down, as was a fourth soldier. The gunman then targeted the commuters, strafing their cars.

Before the shooting ended, two more soldiers and three Jewish settlers were either dead or mortally wounded. Six others were wounded, including the civilian chief of security for settlements in the region. The gunman escaped.

On Saturday, an Israeli police officer was shot dead in the West Bank. In another incident in the Gaza Strip early Sunday, a soldier was shot dead outside a Jewish settlement.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Arafat’s Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the attack on the Israeli checkpoint, the third such assault in recent weeks. The same militia claimed responsibility for Saturday night’s suicide bombing and for the policeman’s death.

In each case, Israel’s invasion last week of the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank city of Nablus and of another camp in Jenin, also in the West Bank, was cited as the reason for the attack.

“Let me tell that dog Sharon that I will strike and I will avenge my families in the Balata refugee camp . . . [and] Jenin refugee camp, and on behalf of all the martyrs in Palestine,” said suicide bomber Mohammed Daraghma, 18, in a statement videotaped before he blew himself to bits in Jerusalem on Saturday night.

Israeli troops thrust deep into the camps, killing more than 20 Palestinians, some of them civilians, before withdrawing. The army said the incursions were meant to demonstrate that Israel will not hesitate to pursue gunmen wherever they may be, even at the risk of Palestinian civilian and Israeli military casualties.

But military analysts here have harshly criticized the invasions as unnecessarily risky and provocative, and some Israeli commentators Sunday also linked those operations to the new surge of attacks.

“The operation in Balata and Jenin did not cause the suicide bombing attack last night in Jerusalem,” said commentator Oded Granot in the Maariv newspaper, “but it did silence the Palestinian voices who called for the terror attacks to be curbed and restricted to settlers and army roadblocks only.”

And Nahum Barnea, a respected political analyst, wrote in Yediot Aharonot that “something, someone has to break this cycle of violence.”

After more than 17 months of fighting “we know that salvation does not lie with the army,” Barnea wrote. “The terrorism of suicide bombings was born of despair, and there is no military solution to despair. But salvation does not lie with Arafat either. The war has slipped out of his control and has turned into a war of one people against another.”

Two of the soldiers killed at the roadblock were also from Rishon, Israel’s fourth-largest city. Located just south of Tel Aviv, the bustling and prosperous community had escaped unscathed from the months of carnage. There had been no suicide bombings here, no gunmen stalking the streets.

Residents who poured into the cemetery Sunday afternoon to bury Gafnit and Shlomi Nehmad and their two daughters, Shiraz, 7, and Liran, 3, were shocked into a grim-faced silence as they watched remaining family members fall apart during the eulogies.

The Nehmads were killed as they stood outside a bar mitzvah they had attended in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Beit Israel neighborhood Saturday night. They died along with Shlomi Nehmad’s 15-year-old nephew, Shaul Nehmad, and Gafnit Nehmad’s 11-year-old nephew, Lidor, and the boy’s 18-month-old sister, Oriya. All seven were buried in the Rishon cemetery.

Sobs racking his body, Shimon Ilan, the father of Lidor and Oriya and brother of Gafnit Nehmad, told the mourners that he was standing near his car, Oriya in his arms and his 8-year-old daughter Noa beside him, when the blast occurred.

“Everything went flying in the air. I wanted to look for my baby. My daughter lifted her, screaming, ‘Oriya is dead! Oriya is dead!’ ” Ilan said. “I looked for my son, 11 years old. I am crazy about him. I saw him lying on the road, full of blood. I screamed and said: ‘God! Why?’ ”

Ilan clutched the pillow his son slept on as he spoke.

“I cannot separate from him,” he said. “This is his pillow, which will be with me for as long as I live.”

Speaking to a reporter before leaving for the funeral, Mayor Nitzan said he was fed up with the government. It needs to take much stronger military steps, he said, and at the same time immediately open negotiations with the Palestinians.

“We have not had a day like this in Rishon since we were bombed by the Egyptians in the 1948 War of Independence,” Nitzan said. “These people were killed because they were Jews. They were killed coming out from prayers. To kill people who have been praying is paganism. It is not Islam to kill people as they come from their prayers.”

The government’s response, Nitzan said, must be fundamentally different from what it has been.

“The bombers must know that we will destroy the home of their families,” he said. “And if there is a mosque that taught the bomber to do this thing, or a religious school that preached to do it, they are places of paganism and must be destroyed.”