26 Gunmen Cross Into Gaza

One by one, the 26 Palestinian gunmen walked across the checkpoint at Erez on Friday and into the covered causeway that thousands of Palestinian workers once passed through on their way to jobs in Israel.

The gunmen were heading the other way, into the Gaza Strip, sent here from the West Bank city of Bethlehem as part of a deal that ended a five-week standoff between Palestinians and Israelis at the Church of the Nativity.

Most of the militants vowed that they would soon pick up arms against Israel again.

“We will fight until the liberation of our land,” said Mazen Hussein, 28, who added that he was a fighter with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Fatah organization.

Hussein said he was setting foot in this Palestinian area for the first time. “Now, we’ll be fighters with our friends in Gaza,” he said. “In the bus coming down here, the Israeli soldiers said to us, ‘We are coming to Gaza next.’ Let them come.”

But inside Israel, debate over an assault on Gaza intensified Friday. “Senior Officers Question the Wisdom of Gaza Operation” was the provocative front-page headline on Haaretz, and other newspapers wrote similar stories.

Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel reported that the Israeli government was under pressure from the Bush administration to limit its response to a suicide bombing Tuesday that killed 15 Israelis at a pool hall near Tel Aviv.

Senior officers, he said, feared that an incursion would lead to high casualties on both sides and would scuttle international efforts to bring about at least a temporary lull in the fighting.

Senior reserve officers, Harel said, have been outspoken to the media and in internal debates over the planned operation.

“They said unlike Defensive Shield, which was perceived as necessary, going into Gaza will break the public consensus,” Harel reported, referring to Israel’s massive military sweep through the West Bank last month.

In the United States, President Bush on Friday welcomed the end of the Bethlehem siege, even as he and other officials warily watched the Israeli buildup around Gaza. U.S. officials are particularly concerned that a new Israeli incursion could produce retaliatory violence that would slow efforts to calm the Middle East conflict.

“We’re watching carefully. We’re in touch with [the Israelis]. But obviously the decisions are theirs,” said a senior State Department official who requested anonymity.

Bush expressed guarded optimism during a fund-raiser in Columbus, Ohio, for Gov. Robert A. Taft and the state Republican Party, calling events in Bethlehem “positive news in a troubled region.”

The gunmen from the Church of the Nativity said they believe that Israel will attack Gaza and that they will again find themselves locked in battle.

More than 200 Palestinians sought refuge in the church April 2 after Israeli forces, responding to a suicide bombing that killed 28 Israelis during the Passover holiday, moved into Bethlehem. As part of the deal ending the siege at the church, 13 gunmen wanted by Israel were sent into exile overseas and the 26 others were sent here.

Palestinian security officers met the 26 gunmen at the Erez crossing Friday and escorted them to the Cliff Hotel, on the coast in Gaza City. There, some of the men knelt to kiss the ground, and each received a hero’s welcome. The men fired into the air with assault rifles handed to them by passersby. Onlookers chanted and clapped.

Their arrival boosted spirits among Gazans as they braced for an Israeli assault, and it fueled anger with Arafat and his Palestinian Authority. Many in this hotbed of Islamic militancy view the Palestinian leader’s decision to send the 13 militants into exile as an act of treachery. Although Israel has periodically deported Palestinians since it captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East War, it never before did so with Palestinian consent.

“We are totally against it,” said Ismail abu Shanab, a leader of the militant Islamic movement Hamas. “It is illegal under international law to deport a person from his native land; his struggle is one for existence. We know that Israel wants to deport us from our land.”

But Hamas canceled protest rallies it had planned for Friday in Gaza City and the Jabaliya refugee camp. Hamas sources said leaders decided that it would be unwise to bring tens of thousands of militants into the streets in such a tense situation. The Palestinian Authority arrested 16 low-level members of the movement Thursday, and on Friday reportedly arrested some members of the militant group Islamic Jihad.

The Kholifa Mosque in what passes for Jabaliya’s main square was packed at midday. As the green flag of Hamas flapped from a tower atop the stucco mosque, more than 2,000 men prayed inside.

The camp, home to more than 100,000 refugees, is a Hamas stronghold. Residents did what they could Friday to prepare for an Israeli incursion, fortifying the warren of homes and meager shops by piling mounds of sand in the roads, which some said have been booby-trapped.

According to Israeli media reports, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer met Friday night with senior generals to hash out differences over the scope and duration of the planned operation in Gaza.

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Times staff writers Edwin Chen and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.