Mideast Envoy Pushes Truce

U.S. envoy Anthony C. Zinni tried to push Israeli and Palestinian leaders toward a cease-fire Friday, as residents of this battered city emerged from their homes for the first time since Israeli tanks withdrew.

Israel had sent more than 100 tanks into the Palestinians’ most important city Monday night in what it said was an effort to destroy militias based here. As the gunmen fought, or hid, within a civilian population of 60,000, tanks crushed cars, reduced stone walls around gardens to rubble and felled lampposts and utility poles.

The bullets and shells that flew during gun battles between Israeli troops and Palestinian militias damaged dozens of homes and businesses. Most of the commercial district remained closed Friday, hours after the tanks withdrew Thursday night.

In central Manara Square, someone had leaned metal plates from an Israeli tank against the paws of one of four stone lions that stand sentry over the square’s long-broken fountain. Gunmen boasted that the plates were evidence of the fight they had put up against the vastly better trained and better armed Israeli troops.

But the death toll told a different story. Twelve Palestinian police officers and gunmen died here in the fighting. One Israeli soldier was killed. The armed men who flooded the streets here to chant nationalistic slogans and demand revenge at the funerals Friday had offered only sporadic resistance when the troops took control of the city.

Zinni, who began his mission by meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Thursday night in Jerusalem and demanding a full pullout of Israeli forces from Palestinian-controlled areas, came to Ramallah on Friday night to demand that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat rein in militants and enforce a cease-fire.

The two emerged smiling from a 90-minute session at Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters.

Zinni, a retired Marine Corps general, described his meeting with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders as “extremely positive. I think everyone is committed to get out of this terrible situation.”

President Bush “has laid out a vision and a plan,” Zinni said. “I’m here to help both sides implement that plan, and I am encouraged that we are going to identify the mechanism that will allow us to implement that plan. I think that, in the next few days, we can start in the implementation of the plan that we have brought.”

Arafat said he was committed to the peace process and hoped that “President Bush, the son,” will complete the peace process between Israel and the Arabs that his father began at the 1991 Madrid peace conference.

Bush, meeting Friday with U.S. troops in North Carolina, said he was “very pleased” with the Israeli withdrawal from Ramallah.

“One of the things we’ve got to do is to work with both parties to establish the conditions for eventual peace. And I appreciate Prime Minister Sharon’s decision” to pull out, he said. “Gen. Zinni is in the region now. We’re hopeful that he’ll have an impact on setting the conditions for peace.”

But Israel’s largest military operation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the 1967 Middle East War, launched two weeks before Zinni’s arrival, has left deep scars among Palestinians.

Israel said it had no choice but to go after militias inside Palestinian-controlled areas after a string of deadly attacks on Israelis. Arafat, Sharon said, was encouraging the attacks rather than trying to stop them.

Troops rounded up thousands of men for questioning, occupied or blew up homes and killed dozens of people as they searched for wanted men, their explosives laboratories and weapons. Many Palestinians in Ramallah said Friday that they are convinced that Israel, or at least Sharon’s government, has little interest in peace.

On Friday, eight Palestinians died in several incidents in the Gaza Strip. Among them was an Islamic Jihad militant shot dead by troops as he tried to infiltrate a Jewish settlement, and two Palestinian policemen shot dead in separate incidents. The army said they were planting bombs at two border crossings.

On Friday evening, a woman and four children died in an explosion that each side blamed on the other. Zeina Awawda, 45, was driving in a donkey cart with three of her four children and her nephew near the Palestinian refugee camp of Bureij when there was a huge explosion, Palestinian witnesses said.

“This is a crime the Israelis committed against a mother and her children,” said Abdel Razek Majaydeh, chief of Palestinian police in Gaza. Israeli tanks had withdrawn from the area overnight. But a spokesman for the Israeli army’s Southern Command, who declined to be named, said the cart was blown up by a bomb placed by Palestinians, “who apparently were trying to hit our military vehicles.”

Some Ramallah residents voiced hope Friday that Israel’s pullout from their city and from the West Bank towns of Kalkilya and Tulkarm was the prelude to a cease-fire after 17 1/2 months of fighting that has killed about 1,400 Arabs and Jews.

“I heard the United States ordered them to leave,” said Abdul Daas, 41, referring to a telephone call that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made to Sharon before Zinni arrived in Jerusalem. “I think this time, the end is in sight.”

He sat in the ruins of his Chicken Hut restaurant near Manara Square as he spoke. Bullets and shrapnel had shattered the eatery’s glass front and damaged its refrigerators and cooking units. A second Chicken Hut he owns in another part of town sustained similar damage, he said. Repairing both of them would cost $20,000, he estimated, but he was determined to rebuild.

A naturalized U.S. citizen who owns restaurants in Virginia, Daas said he moved his family to Ramallah when it appeared that Israel and the Palestinians were going to sign a final peace treaty. “I came here three years ago to try to help out my country,” he said. “I’m not going to leave. I’m not going to run away from this problem.”

The events of the last 17 1/2 months had taken their toll, financially and emotionally, he said. But they haven’t caused him to despair of achieving Palestinian statehood.

“The U.S. interest now is to finish up this problem so that they can be ready for other problems, like Iraq,” he said. That is why, Daas said confidently, Zinni has been sent to the region: to put an end to the fighting.

Not far from Daas’ ruined restaurant, Intissar Bakr, 23, sat with her two small sons and a group of neighbors in the Kaddoura neighborhood near Ramallah Hospital. The charred wrecks of half a dozen cars lay within a block of the small group huddled on a debris-strewn sidewalk.

Fighting raged here when the Israelis moved in Monday night, Bakr said.

“We were absolutely terrified,” she said. “It was hell.”

An Israeli tank shell hit steel tanks filled with cooking gas outside the Ali Baba “broasted” chicken restaurant next to Bakr’s apartment as the battle continued, she said. The tanks exploded in a ball of flames, leaving the restaurant a burned-out shell, destroying the nearby cars, blowing out windows in apartments on either side of the street and shaking her building to its foundations.

“The children screamed hysterically,” she said. Her family members fled to a neighbor’s home as their apartment filled with thick dark smoke. They returned Friday to find their windows shattered, walls pocked with bullet holes and the water and electricity cut.

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Times staff writer Edwin Chen in Washington contributed to this report.