Army Strikes Kill 17 Palestinians

The Israeli army killed at least 17 Palestinians, including the wife of an Islamic militant, their three children and a doctor, on Monday as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon vowed to inflict heavy losses after a weekend of attacks on Israelis.

The army raided towns, villages and refugee camps and launched airstrikes hours after the Israeli government said it would increase pressure on the Palestinians. Cabinet ministers called for the destruction of the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinians promised retaliation, and early today, a Palestinian gunman armed with an M-16 automatic rifle opened fire on the Seafood Market restaurant in Tel Aviv, killing three people and wounding 30 before he was shot dead, police spokesman Gil Kleiman said.

The gunman reportedly stood on a bridge above Petah Tikva Street and began spraying the street with gunfire about 2:15 a.m., Kleiman said. He also threw two homemade grenades into the crowd, then jumped down and opened fire on the restaurant and a steakhouse next door. When he ran out of ammunition, he began stabbing people before patrons of the restaurant and police shot him dead, Kleiman said.

“We heard the first shot, and I thought it was a firecracker,” said Gilly Cohen, a witness who was in the restaurant. “Then we heard more shooting. . . . The terrorist sprayed the people inside from the windows. People started pushing toward the bathroom and became hysterical.”

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia connected with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the attack and identified the shooter as Ibrahim Hassouna, from the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.

In a warning to Arafat, the army targeted three of his office complexes Sunday night, including the Ramallah headquarters where Israel has confined him for three months.

Attack helicopters fired missiles into the front gate of the Ramallah compound and into a military intelligence building behind Arafat’s offices. Arafat was unharmed, said his spokesman, Nabil abu Rudaineh.

Israeli fighter jets severely damaged a Palestinian security compound in the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Palestinian witnesses said jets fired four missiles into the complex, destroying intelligence offices and a prison. Palestinians said eight people were slightly injured. Gunboats also fired missiles at Arafat’s seaside offices in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources reported. There were no injuries and little damage.

Palestinians “must be dealt a heavy blow which will come from every direction,” Sharon told reporters after briefing a committee of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

“Anyone wishing to conduct negotiations with [the Palestinians] must first hit them hard, so that it is clear to them that they will achieve nothing through terror. If it is not made clear to them that they are overpowered, we will be unable to return to negotiations,” Sharon said. “We must inflict heavy losses on their side.”

Sickened by a series of attacks that claimed the lives of 22 Israelis over the weekend, among them several children, Cabinet ministers and the Israeli public are demanding that Sharon change policies that have failed to deliver the security or peace he promised when elected a year ago.

They are deeply divided, however, over whether he should deal a crushing blow to the Palestinian Authority or immediately open negotiations with it.

“I support every move that would worsen the situation for the Palestinians until they cry out, ‘We want a cease-fire,’ ” Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit, considered a moderate in Sharon’s right-wing Likud Party, told Israel Radio.

“All our efforts have failed,” Sheetrit said, “and I have no doubt that we should punish them badly. I’m all for having the [army] strike anyone involved in this without further ado.”

But the toll of dead Palestinian civilians Monday underscored the risks Israel runs in intensifying its pursuit of guerrilla fighters among the 3 million residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Sheik Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader and founder of the militant Islamic movement Hamas, said Israel “is going to pay a dear price” for its actions.

Palestinian Cabinet minister and peace negotiator Saeb Erekat called for international intervention to stop Israel’s attacks, as did the Palestinian Authority in a statement issued by its WAFA news agency.

In New York, United Nations officials called on Israel to withdraw its forces from refugee camps and urged both sides to return to negotiations.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that the U.N., the United States, the European Union and Russia were working “to try and help the parties come back from the brink.”

Annan said he hoped that a tentative Saudi peace initiative, in which Arab states would offer Israel normal relations in exchange for complete withdrawal from territories captured in the 1967 Middle East War, would help persuade Israelis and Palestinians to resume talks.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Washington, backed Mubarak’s proposal to host an Israeli-Palestinian summit.

In the West Bank, the wife of leading Hamas militant Hussein abu Kweik of Ramallah was heading home after picking up their three children from school when Israeli troops fired a tank shell at her Mitsubishi truck.

The shell turned the cabin of the truck into a flaming wreck of shattered steel, scattered schoolbooks and dismembered bodies. Bushra abu Kweik, 38, was killed instantly, along with all three children: Aziza, 16; Bara, 14; and Mohammed, 10.

Imad Masri, 34, was driving behind the truck, taking his 16-year-old nephew, his 4-year-old niece, and other children home from school. Masri’s white Subaru was also hit. His nephew and niece were killed, and Masri was injured. Five other children survived with scrapes.

Nida Mashal, 24, was in her home when she heard “a very large explosion” and ran into the street.

“I saw the body of the lady. We pulled one boy alive from the car, but the children in the other car were all blown away,” Mashal said.

An Israeli army spokesman said the tank fired on the family by mistake. In a statement, the army said it had targeted a carload of armed Palestinians and expressed “deep regret” for the killings. Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer also apologized for the deaths.

A defiant Hussein abu Kweik marched in a rally organized by Hamas an hour after his family was killed. Wearing a green baseball cap emblazoned with the movement’s name, Abu Kweik said the Palestinians “will defeat Sharon with our will and our determination to resist.”

He spoke as hundreds marched through Ramallah in a show of force. Dozens of heavily armed men, many wearing the green bandannas of Hamas, some waving flags, chanted slogans calling for revenge and fired their automatic weapons into the air.

Passersby looked on approvingly.

“What do the Israelis want from us? Do they now kill only for the sake of killing?” asked 45-year-old Samia Shanan. “This Israeli government is a bunch of criminals, killers, and the Israelis are not taking responsibility. These young people who are going to fight the Israelis have a very clear understanding and faith that they have a right to live, to be here, because this is their country.”

The army also apologized for an incident in which troops fired on an ambulance in the Jenin refugee camp and killed a doctor, 57-year-old Khalil Suleiman. Three medics and a 9-year-old girl, who was being evacuated, were wounded. The girl already had been injured during fighting between the army and Palestinians in the camp.

Dr. Hossam Sharkawi, head of emergency services for the Red Crescent in the Palestinian territories, said the army had prevented ambulances from evacuating the dead and wounded from the camp for hours. Suleiman was in the first ambulance allowed inside to evacuate the child, Sharkawi said.

An army spokesman said ambulances were kept out of the camp “only because there was a heavy exchange of gunfire” and were allowed in when the fighting subsided. In a statement, the army said one ambulance was fired on by troops because it approached them “at a high speed” and the soldiers thought that their lives were in danger.

At least six people died during the fighting inside the camp, Palestinians said, including a 53-year-old woman, a 17-year-old girl and at least one gunman. Three other men reportedly were killed by tank fire.

Palestinians also reported that an 18-year-old student was shot dead when he approached an army checkpoint near the West Bank town of Tulkarm.

The violence Monday began in the predawn hours when Israeli troops entered the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and shot dead three Palestinians during clashes there. Late Monday, Israel Radio reported that three Israelis were wounded in the West Bank, two in a drive-by shooting and one when stones were thrown at a bus in which she was riding.

The army began raiding Palestinian refugee camps last week, saying it wanted to demonstrate that it will hunt down militants anywhere, even in the crowded camps.

Palestinian militants, in turn, have vowed to avenge the attacks on the camps. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in an ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood Saturday night that killed 10 Israelis, including several children. The organization also claimed responsibility for a sniper attack on an army roadblock near the West Bank Jewish settlement of Ofra on Sunday in which seven soldiers and three civilians were killed.

Israeli military commentators said Monday that the army had decided to launch “all-out war” on the Fatah militia in an effort to stem the rising tide of attacks on its soldiers and on Israeli civilians.

In an interview in Ramallah, Marwan Barghouti, leader of Fatah’s Tanzim militia, said he was unperturbed by the army’s threat.

“It’s not new,” Barghouti said as he strolled down the street surrounded by bodyguards. “They have already assassinated a lot of our cadres. The Tanzim is part of this people, and the Israelis will never break the Tanzim. What Israel is doing now is just a new, very dangerous escalation, and I think there will be a lot of responses.”

This morning, a suicide bomber apparently blew himself up on a bus at the central bus station in Afula, a northern Israeli town, Israel Radio said. Police reported finding two bodies and said 11 people had been injured, most of them lightly.

In addition, one Israeli was shot dead and another injured this morning in a drive-by shooting on a road used by Jewish settlers near Bethlehem, an Israeli army spokesman said.

Just after the school day began this morning, a bomb went off in the playground of an Arab school in the Arab south Jerusalem neighborhood of Sour Baher. A teacher was moderately injured, and at least eight children suffered light injuries from flying glass, Israel Radio reported. The radio said an anonymous caller told police that “Revenge of the Infants”--a previously unknown group--took responsibility for the attack. The group was believed to consist of Jewish extremists.

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Times staff writer William Orme at the United Nations contributed to this report.