Death Toll Rises as Israel Presses Hunt for Militants

Israeli army tanks smashed into the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip late Monday and drove to the heart of Ramallah in the West Bank as Israel intensified its hunt for militants. Palestinians reported at least 22 dead and 75 injured in heavy fighting in Jabaliya, the largest refugee camp in Gaza.

Israeli television reported that shortly before midnight, about 50 tanks entered the sprawling camp, which is home to about 100,000 refugees and is a bastion of militancy. Gun battles erupted immediately. Within an hour, Gazan hospital officials reported receiving a dozen dead. Palestinians said some of the wounded lay bleeding in the streets as ambulances were delayed at army checkpoints.

By this morning, the army said it had pulled out of Jabaliya, after destroying what a spokeswoman said were 25 workshops where Kassam rockets and mortar shells were made.

In the West Bank, the army said it took over Al Birah, Ramallah and the Al Amari refugee camp overnight. There were no initial reports of injuries, but Palestinians said tanks were shelling the refugee camp and had blown up the home there of a female suicide bomber.

An army spokeswoman said troops were conducting house-to-house searches “to protect Israeli citizens from terrorism.” Palestinian sources in Ramallah said streets were empty as residents locked themselves in their homes.

On Monday, hundreds of Palestinian men and boys--stripped to their undershirts, their hands on their heads--waited in line for hours outside a stonecutting factory here at the Dahaisha refugee camp near Bethlehem for Israeli troops to handcuff, blindfold and interrogate them.

The army said it rounded up about 600 boys and men, ages 13 to 45, in Dahaisha and about 500 in the West Bank town of Kalkilya. An army spokeswoman said she did not know if any of the wanted militants had been found.

Also Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon confirmed that Israel had partially lifted travel restrictions on Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. The government had used tanks to confine Arafat to the West Bank city of Ramallah since December.

Sharon told members of parliament from his right-wing Likud Party that despite his decision to ease restrictions on Arafat and to drop a demand for seven days of quiet before Israel will start cease-fire talks, the military’s widespread operations in Palestinian-controlled territories would continue.

More than 200 Israelis and Palestinians have died in the fighting since the beginning of March. The surging violence has cast doubt on the chances for success of a new Bush administration effort to secure a cease-fire. President Bush’s envoy, Anthony C. Zinni, is due in Jerusalem on Thursday.

Palestinians said Israel’s actions on the ground made its decision to partially free Arafat insignificant. Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed-Rabbo called on Israel “to end the closure that all the Palestinian people have been living under for more than 18 months.”

If Arafat does tour Palestinian-controlled areas, he will find many of their police stations and government buildings, as well as his house and offices on Gaza’s seashore, reduced to rubble by Israeli air raids.

Sharon’s office said Arafat would be free to travel within Palestinian-controlled territories because he arrested all the suspects in October’s assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi. The Palestinian leader will have to request permission from Israel to travel abroad, including to an upcoming Arab summit in Beirut, where Saudi Arabia is expected to present a peace plan.

Troops began rounding up Palestinian males in Dahaisha at 6 a.m. Monday, in an operation similar to one carried out in a refugee camp near the West Bank town of Tulkarm over the weekend. In Tulkarm, troops detained more than 1,000 men and boys, arresting about 30 of them. The army has said the mass detentions are part of its effort to break the infrastructure of militant groups that are carrying out attacks on Israelis.

Hussein Hamash, 40, said he walked to the quarry by the stonecutting factory after troops using loudspeakers demanded that Dahaisha’s men turn themselves in. “I thought it was better than having them come and get me,” he said.

He and his wife had cowered in their house through the night with their six children. First the camp was shelled, then troops began cutting through the walls of the cinder block houses on the outskirts to search for suspects without having to walk the camp’s narrow alleys.

“It was a horrible situation,” Hamash said. “Women cried, children were frightened. The camp was surrounded.”

Hamash, who is diabetic, said he was held at the quarry for nine hours before being released after nine hours when a computer check showed he had no security record. He had been seen by an army doctor, given water and two pieces of bread to eat during the ordeal.

Hundreds of men remained in the courtyard of the factory, awaiting interrogation, he said.

The operation, Hamash said, “is unnecessary.” The armed men, he said, fled the camp days earlier after Israel launched its current offensive by raiding the Balata refugee camp near Nablus, in the West Bank.

“The Popular Resistance Committees said there should be no resistance, that they learned from the experience of the other camps, Tulkarm and Balata, where there was resistance and people were killed,” Hamash said, referring to an umbrella organization of militants.

The mass roundups are not intended to be “an action against civilians,” an Israeli army spokeswoman said Monday night. “We have no interest in arresting innocent people. That is why they are free to go after a maximum of a day or so.”

In addition to capturing some wanted men, the army has uncovered arms caches and weapons factories in its raids. But thousands of civilians have been placed under curfew for days at a time, and dozens of civilians have been injured or killed during the operations. Six Palestinians were killed Monday before the army’s incursion into Jabaliya, shot dead in exchanges of fire with troops in Kalkilya, the Gaza Strip and the village of Yatta in the West Bank, according to Palestinians.

A trio of Israeli tanks, an armored personnel carrier and a bulldozer stood guard outside Dahaisha on Monday. Inside the camp, Bethlehem Road, the main street, was littered with the debris of war: a downed lamppost, an unlit Molotov cocktail, stones, tires and trash. Shops were tightly shuttered, front doors locked.

People remained confined to their homes, where some said they were running low on food and water. Water supplies were disrupted when Israeli bulldozers hit pipes as they dug trenches across the camp’s main road to prevent the passage of cars. Residents said they have been afraid to come out of their homes since Friday afternoon, when troops first surrounded the camp. They have been under curfew since soldiers entered late Sunday night.

No one was killed Monday in Dahaisha, and troops pulled out this morning. But the blood of Issa Faraj, 24, who was killed Friday, remained on the carpet in his living room and on the walls, floors and toys in the room his two children share. The date of his death, March 8, was written in blood on one wall.

Faraj was fatally injured in the children’s room when two bullets, which his wife believes were fired by Israeli troops, tore through the third-story window. Ahlam Faraj, the 21-year-old widow, said her husband was sitting on the floor playing with Legos with his daughter when he was hit twice in the chest. He staggered into the living room before he collapsed.

“He just looked into my eyes,” said Faraj, her voice choking with emotion. “I wish I had died with him.”

Faraj said they managed to get her husband to a nearby hospital in Beit Jala, but doctors there could not treat his gaping wounds. By the time an ambulance could get clearance to pass through Israeli army checkpoints to take him to a Jerusalem hospital, she said, he was dead.

An army spokeswoman said she knew of no exchange of gunfire in that area of the camp Friday afternoon. Passage of the ambulance was delayed, she said, because the Palestinian hospital staff did not coordinate with the army.

Israeli military analysts say the incursions into refugee camps serve mainly to underscore the army’s determination to send troops anywhere and to do whatever it takes to slow a wave of suicide attacks. The bombings have demoralized Israelis and undermined Sharon’s political support.

The prime minister’s political problems were highlighted Monday night by a rally of 50,000 to 60,000 right-wing activists in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. Waving banners calling for Arafat’s expulsion from the West Bank, the demonstrators called on Sharon to “return to himself” and launch an all-out war to crush the Palestinian Authority.

Many in the crowd advocated the mass expulsion of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. More than 1,600 police officers and other security forces were deployed to protect the crowd from possible terrorist attack.

The rally came as political pundits here were calling the decision of the tiny, far-right National Union-Israel Beitenu party to bolt from Sharon’s broad-based coalition the beginning of the end of the government. The party’s two ministers said they would resign from the Cabinet today. They cited Sharon’s decision to negotiate under fire and to allow Arafat to leave Ramallah as evidence that the government is not serious about defeating the Palestinians.

The defection is expected to increase the centrist Labor Party’s influence in the government because Sharon’s majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, will be narrowed. If Labor pulls out, Sharon would lose his majority.