Israeli Premier Opts for Restraint

Israelis buried six more victims of Palestinian attacks as pressure mounted Wednesday on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to either launch another wide-scale military operation in the West Bank or erect a wall to separate it from pre-1967 Israel.

With U.S. envoys heading toward the region to begin rebuilding Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation and lay the groundwork for an international conference, Sharon rejected any change in policy--for now.

At a stormy Cabinet meeting, Sharon turned aside advice from ministers that he send massive forces back into Palestinian towns or immediately build a security wall to cut off the West Bank. He reprimanded army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz for recommending that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat be expelled from the West Bank. Stick to military issues and stay away from politics, Sharon reportedly told Mofaz.

The session ended with no decisions on how to respond to two Palestinian attacks Tuesday night in the West Bank in which four Israelis, including three teenage boys, were killed.

“We will follow the same policy,” said Raanan Gissin, spokesman for the prime minister. “We will respond based on concrete information, to hit the terrorists before they hit us, to hit them in their beds, in their cities.”

A New Round

of Diplomacy

Sharon opted for restraint as he awaited the arrival today of U.S. envoy William Burns to discuss convening a peace conference. CIA Director George J. Tenet is expected to arrive as early as Friday to begin contacts with Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs. A situation of seething tension awaits the two envoys.

The new round of diplomacy is aimed primarily at getting the Palestinian Authority to adopt political reforms and restructure its security forces, two steps that would make a Palestinian state more acceptable to Israel, according to U.S. officials.

At the same time, the United States is urging Israel not to take actions, including another prolonged incursion in the West Bank, that would impede this process and escalate hostilities, the officials said.

The Bush administration is deeply disappointed with Arafat’s failure to rein in terrorists, officials say.

“The uptake in terrorist activity over the past week or so has been a clear indication that more needs to be done,” a senior administration official said.

Since ending the five-week Operation Defensive Shield this month, Israel has routinely sent troops and tanks into Palestinian-controlled areas in what the army says is an ongoing effort to thwart attacks. Troops occupied the biblical town of Bethlehem for a fourth day Wednesday, carrying out house-to-house searches for militants and keeping residents under curfew. Elsewhere in the West Bank, troops were in the town of Kalkilya and continuing a days-long blockade of Tulkarm.

This morning, officials and witnesses said, about 40 Israeli armored vehicles entered the West Bank city of Hebron, and troops arrested at least four people, including a senior member of Hamas and a senior member of Islamic Jihad--both militant Islamic groups.

On Tuesday, soldiers entered, then pulled out of the northern West Bank city of Jenin, scene last month of one of the bloodiest fights between Israeli forces and Palestinian gunmen.

Frustration with the army’s tactics is growing, however, as militants elude the arrest raids and slip through roadblocks and other defenses to carry out the sort of attacks Defensive Shield sought to eliminate.

“And once again Jenin,” Yoav Limor wrote in the Maariv newspaper Tuesday. “As if they hadn’t left the city last month, at the end of a bloody battle whose bottom line, so it was promised, was that it ‘successfully destroyed the local terrorist infrastructure.’”

Attacks on Israelis dropped sharply in the immediate wake of Defensive Shield, a senior military official told reporters in a briefing Wednesday. “But in the last few days, we can sense a degrading in the situation,” said the official, who declined to be named.

His observation is painfully self-evident to Israelis, many of whom had thought that Defensive Shield had restored some normality to life.

In little more than 24 hours this week, Israelis saw a woman and her toddler granddaughter killed in a suicide bombing, a pool lifeguard shot to death as he drove a West Bank road and three teenage boys gunned down while playing basketball at a settlement.

“Operation Defensive Shield, it turns out, is a limited shield that urgently needs reinforcement,” settler Hanoch Daum wrote in Maariv. “Israel’s citizens are not prepared to return to the terrible days in which shooting attacks were an everyday occurrence and suicide terrorists wandered around Israel looking for crowds of people.”

Among those buried Wednesday were Ruth Peled, 56, and her 18-month-old granddaughter, Sinai Keinan. The two were killed, and Sinai’s parents injured, when a suicide bomber blew himself up Monday in a crowd of families outside an ice cream shop in Petah Tikvah, six miles northeast of Tel Aviv.

Thousands attended the joint funeral at Kibbutz Shfayim, near the coastal city of Netanya. Sinai’s disconsolate parents, newly discharged from the hospital, were pushed in wheelchairs behind the coffins.

“Before another child turns into statistics or into an equation, all the generals and the politicians and the statesmen must go all the way and not stop,” Lior Keinan, Sinai’s father, said in a hospital interview before the funeral. “They must just finish with this.”

Palestinian Panel Urges

End to Attacks in Israel

In a statement issued Wednesday, the Revolutionary Council of Arafat’s Fatah movement said suicide attacks inside Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries should end. “Military attacks inside the Green Line must stop because they reflect negatively on the image of our national struggle,” the council, a key policymaking forum, said after two weeks of debate.

The group, however, said it supports what it called “resistance” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip--meaning attacks on Jewish settlers and soldiers there.

Despite the declaration, Israeli security officials say they are thwarting attacks almost daily that are planned in the Israeli heartland. For the second consecutive day Wednesday, traffic snarled in the crowded coastal plain and in Jerusalem as police stopped and searched cars, looking for suspected militants. National Police Chief Shlomo Aharonishky said the police had reports that a gang had set out from the West Bank city of Ramallah intending to carry out an attack in downtown Jerusalem.

The army reported Wednesday night that it had arrested a 20-year-old Palestinian woman in the mostly Christian village of Beit Sahur, south of the city. An army spokesman said she was meant to be a second bomber in a suicide attack last week in the town of Rishon Le Zion that killed two Israelis. She apparently backed out of the attack, the army said.

Also Wednesday night, the Israeli Internet news service Y-net reported that a would-be bomber was stopped at a checkpoint north of Jerusalem but escaped on foot carrying a bag loaded with explosives. A manhunt was said to be underway.

For more than a year, Maariv noted in an editorial, Israelis have been forced “to maintain a routine on the brink of madness: going to work, school, shopping, even a night out in the constant shadow of terrorism.” Such a “routine of terrorism, the death roulette, the constant fear, are things no country can accept.”

Times staff writers Robin Wright in Washington and Megan K. Stack in Jerusalem contributed to this report.