Israeli Army Enters Heart of Ramallah

Israeli forces penetrated the heart of the Palestinians’ most important city Wednesday as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejected myriad calls for restraint and pressed ahead with his nation’s largest military operation in three decades.

Israel tightened its control over most of Ramallah, sending tanks down the avenues leading into the city’s central Manara Square but skirting, for now, the compound where Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat has his headquarters.

Helicopter gunships fired on targets in the city, and tanks shelled an area where Palestinian gunmen were operating. Sporadic exchanges of fire exploded throughout the day and into the night. Israeli troops took up positions in schools and homes and conducted house-to-house searches in the Al Amari refugee camp for a second day.

Before the current conflict erupted more than 17 months ago, Ramallah was the commercial and political center of Palestinian society. Now it is a spooky no man’s land of deserted streets, fearful residents and angry combatants.

Cars lay smashed in the roads, crushed by tanks that kicked up dust and smoke as they rumbled by. In some neighborhoods, residents could be seen rushing through the streets, loaded down with bags of pita bread after a lone bakery opened during a lull in the violence.

Wednesday’s dead included one Israeli soldier, a senior Palestinian police commander and an Italian journalist hit by fire from an Israeli tank, according to witnesses. Several other journalists were hurt when Israeli forces opened fire on their vehicles and offices, the journalists said.

The vast offensive, with its stated aim of hunting down militants who are killing Israelis--and of destroying the militants’ weaponry--comes on the eve of a difficult U.S. mission aimed at halting the violence. After a long U.S. absence from this region’s peacemaking diplomacy, special envoy Anthony C. Zinni is due to arrive today in a bid to broker a cease-fire.

Sharon Not Ready to End the Offensive

But Israelis and Palestinians threw cold water on the chances for a truce.

U.S. diplomats are reported to have joined European and U.N. attempts to pressure Sharon to withdraw from Ramallah and scale back the military campaign. Since March 1, Israel has flooded the West Bank and Gaza Strip with 20,000 troops to raid Palestinian refugee camps, lay siege to Palestinian cities and towns and control roads in between--all with the goal of defending Israeli citizens and eradicating terrorism.

Turning aside the criticism, and the demands of his own defense minister, Sharon made it clear Wednesday that he is not ready to stop the offensive.

Israeli defense analysts said Sharon intends to gain the maximum military advantage over the Palestinians before Zinni’s arrival forces a cease-fire on him. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Sharon plans to extend the Ramallah operation at least until the arrival Monday of Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Ramallah operation has caused a rift in the Israeli government. Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had ordered the actions to be limited ahead of Zinni’s arrival. But Sharon overruled him.

In a bitter argument during a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, the contents of which were leaked to Israeli media, Ben-Eliezer threatened to quit the government and take the center-left Labor Party--Sharon’s largest coalition partner--with him. Sharon called Ben-Eliezer’s bluff, and the defense minister backed down. The Ramallah offensive continued.

The Israeli army insists that the campaign won’t target Arafat personally. But no one could miss the sarcasm in the name the army gave to it: “Operation Your Turn Is Next.”

Palestinians also ignored pleas to end violence Wednesday, vowing to step up suicide bombings and shooting ambushes. A suspected Palestinian assailant stabbed and critically wounded a man in a Jewish settlement near Ramallah on Wednesday night, and another heavily armed Palestinian opened fire on an Israeli convoy in the Gaza Strip. He was killed, but no one else was hurt, the army said.

This morning, a bomb exploded next to a large vehicle in the Gaza Strip, killing at least three Israelis, military sources said. They said the attack occurred on a road to the Jewish settlement of Netzarim.

Israeli tanks charged up the streets leading into Manara Square and remained in it for a time before withdrawing Wednesday. Many Palestinian gunmen have been holed up in the plaza. On Tuesday, they used it to string up a Palestinian suspected of collaborating with Israel.

Ramallah is under the control of more than 100 tanks and armored vehicles and hundreds of soldiers from Israel’s paratroop battalion, infantry, engineers corps and others who moved toward the center of the city from the north, south and west, capturing as they went the neighborhoods of Al Birah and Tira, where several leaders of the Palestinian Authority live.

An Israeli soldier was killed in one gun battle. The other dead included Raffaele Ciriello, 42, a freelance photographer from Italy who was shot six times in the chest and stomach by an Israeli soldier firing a heavy-caliber machine gun from a tank, according to other journalists who were with him. Ciriello’s colleagues said he was standing near Palestinian gunmen when he was shot. He is the first foreign journalist killed in the conflict.

Other journalists came under fire when Israelis attacked the offices of Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite TV network, shortly after reporter Shereen abu Shlek finished a live report.

Palestinians Say Talks Useless Until Soldiers Go

A deputy commander of Arafat’s Force 17 presidential guard was also killed Wednesday.

Angry Palestinian officials said Wednesday that Zinni’s mission will prove pointless unless Israel withdraws from Ramallah. There can be no talk of a truce, they said, while tanks control the Palestinians’ de facto capital.

“Israel must stop the attacks first and withdraw if [the U.S.] expects Zinni to succeed,” Arafat aide Nabil abu Rudaineh said shortly after U.S. Consul General Ronald Schlicher visited the Palestinian leader in his besieged headquarters.

Rudaineh said the U.S. government was pressuring Sharon to call off the offensive but that “clearly Israel is not responding.”

Israel indicated that it had no intention of scaling back its actions until Arafat and the Palestinian Authority reined in their gunmen and militants.

“Israel feels what is necessary now is to talk about the need to reach a cease-fire,” Sharon advisor Dore Gold said. “Israel will not negotiate on the substance of peacemaking while our citizens and military are under this terrorist assault. We hope that Gen. Zinni’s mission works, but at the same time we will do what is necessary to defend our people from this illegitimate form of warfare imposed on us by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.”

The conflict has produced superlatives that are bested almost as soon as they are coined. One “deadliest day yet” or “largest incursion yet” is soon followed by another. The series of raids launched Feb. 28 represents the largest military operation Israel has conducted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since capturing those territories in the 1967 Middle East War.

But there are also many echoes of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, starting with the fact that it pitted arch-nemeses Sharon and Arafat against each other.

A senior Israeli intelligence official said Wednesday that the main target of the Israeli offensive is Arafat’s Fatah movement, a broad-based political and social organization that also has an armed wing. A Fatah-affiliated militia has taken the lead in attacks on Israelis, combining both guerrilla-style shooting ambushes on soldiers and checkpoints with suicide bombings that kill civilians.

Fatah’s most influential leader in the West Bank is Marwan Barghouti. Israeli authorities hold Barghouti responsible for the deaths of 100 civilians, including Jewish settlers, but do not yet consider him a legitimate target. There are two reasons: Eliminating Barghouti would set Palestinian streets afire, and Israel may need him in a post-Arafat future.