Gaza Strip Braces for Onslaught

Israeli tanks and troops moved close to the Gaza Strip on Thursday, and state-run media said an attack was imminent in retaliation for a suicide bombing Tuesday that killed 15 Israelis.

Gazans sent their children to school and went to work, but also laid in stores of food, fearing the sort of siege on their towns, villages and refugee camps that the Israeli army imposed in the West Bank during the invasion launched March 29. The army issued call-ups to an unknown number of reserve soldiers, normally a sign that a large-scale operation is in the offing.

After nightfall, street traffic in Gaza City was light, but restaurants were open. At a popular beach hotel, groups of men gathered to smoke water pipes and argue politics on a balcony overlooking the sea.

“What are we supposed to do, head for the bunkers?” said Ziad abu Amer, a Gazan representative to the Palestinian legislature.

Israeli security sources believe that the man who blew himself up Tuesday night at a snooker club in the Israeli town of Rishon Le Zion was a member of the militant movement Hamas and came from Gaza. But a spokesman for the Islamic organization said he did not know who carried out the attack.

“I don’t know who did it, but we expect that angry Palestinians will do more such attacks,” Ismail abu Shanab said in an interview with The Times. Hamas issued no formal claim of responsibility for the attack.

Abu Shanab mildly criticized the bombing, which he called “this act of resistance,” noting that “maybe this is a critical time and maybe it is better not to do it at this time.” Hamas has carried out more suicide attacks on Israelis than any other Palestinian group since fighting erupted in September 2000. There has been a total of about 60 attacks, many of them in the heart of Israeli cities.

The organization says it wants to destroy the 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians and to eliminate the Jewish state. But it does not want to be blamed for triggering Israel’s knockout blow to the already weakened Palestinian Authority or the expulsion of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

The army swept into six of the West Bank’s eight major cities in the operation, occupying some for several weeks, but stayed out of Palestinian-controlled areas of Gaza. The strip is the stronghold of Islamic militant organizations that have carried out suicide bombings, but Palestinian attackers sent from here rarely penetrate the heavily patrolled fence that separates Gaza from Israel. Last month, security officials argued that Gaza was relatively contained and that the army would pay too high a price in casualties if it mounted a massive ground operation.

But those constraints appear to have been swept away by the Rishon bombing, the deadliest attack by Palestinians since the army’s West Bank operation.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said the coming operation would be “functional, not territorial,” a pinpointed targeting of militant groups rather than an occupation of territory.

But a worried Palestinian Authority, desperate to stave off another crippling blow to its infrastructure, arrested 16 Hamas members in Gaza after Arafat condemned the Rishon bombing in a televised Arabic statement as a terrorist act.

Abu Shanab said all those arrested are low-level supporters. He denied that any were gunmen. “Now is not the time” for the Palestinian Authority to crack down on the organization, Abu Shanab said. “We have to be united, not fighting among ourselves, and preparing for resistance.”

Although he acknowledged Israel’s vast military superiority, Abu Shanab warned that Israeli troops would face determined resistance.

“They will be prisoners in the Palestinian territories, they will not be able to leave their tanks,” he said. “People will find ways to resist.”

Some Israeli commentators and politicians said they feared a large-scale assault would result in heavy casualties among troops and civilians.

More than 1million mostly impoverished Palestinians, many of them refugees, are crowded into squalid camps and cities in the Gaza Strip, along with nearly 7,000 Jewish settlers.

Militants have had ample time to booby-trap the camps, as they did in a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin, where 23 Israeli soldiers and at least 50 Palestinians were killed in fighting last month.

Military analyst Alex Fishman wrote in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot that the army “will rip Gaza to shreds ... but is it really necessary?”

Israel had not yet definitively determined that the Rishon bomber came from Gaza, Fishman said, and even if Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to smash the infrastructure of militant groups in the strip and was proved correct, it might yet be too costly an operation.

Yossi Sarid, leader of the left-wing parliamentary opposition in the Israeli parliament, said a large-scale operation in Gaza would be a “mistake that Israel will regret.” Terror must be fought, he said, “but not on the backs of the civilian population.”

But Sharon received carte blanche from his security Cabinet early Thursday to act in the wake of the bombing. He is likely to enjoy the backing of a majority of Israelis in a nation shaken to the core by the government’s inability to stop suicide attacks.

By midday Thursday, Israel Radio was reporting the pending invasion as a foregone conclusion.