Israel Tightens Grip on Hebron After Palestinian Ambush

Armored vehicles backed by tanks roared into the heart of this divided city Saturday as Israel moved to again seize control after 12 Israelis, nearly all of them soldiers and paramilitary police, were killed by Palestinian gunmen a day earlier in a carefully laid ambush.

The dead included the military commander in Hebron, the highest-ranking Israeli officer to die during 25 months of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Slain along with Col. Dror Weinberg were three soldiers under his command, five paramilitary border police and three members of the security squad of Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement a few hundred yards from the attack site.

With Israeli elections less than three months away, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was under political pressure from right-wing allies to launch an unsparing retaliatory strike against Palestinian militant groups including Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack. Top military officials held consultations Saturday night about the scope and nature of any strike.

In the dusty valley where the killings took place during the first hours of the Jewish Sabbath, along a road used by settlers to walk to prayers at a disputed shrine in downtown Hebron, the city’s deep-rooted animosities were on plain display in the attack’s aftermath.

Sifting through the ruins of three homes demolished by soldiers and mourning the uprooting of an ancient olive grove beside the road where the shooting began, Palestinians murmured that they wished more Jewish settlers had died.

“We hope for 100 more attacks like this,” said 12-year-old Hamid abu Gharbiyyeh, who lives nearby.

Palestinians with homes along the narrow side street where some of the worst fighting took place insisted that they had no connection to three gunmen who had staged the attack from just outside their doors. The three were hunted down and killed by Israeli troops; military officials said they were not certain whether others had taken part in the attack.

A few yards from a cluster of Palestinian homes, angry-looking young Jewish settlers, wearing yarmulkes and toting M-16 rifles, paced the road where the attack took place. It is used by settlers who are always guarded by soldiers walking to and from Sabbath prayers at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a shrine sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

Relations between Hebron’s 120,000 Palestinians and the settlers -- 450 of whom live inside the city, and hundreds more on the outskirts -- have long been marked by rancor and ugly daily confrontations that usually fall to the army to break up.

Many of the settlers hinted that they would take matters into their own hands and exact vengeance for the ambush.

“If I were the Palestinians, I would be very worried about what might happen next,” said 19-year-old Jonathan Stern, an off-duty soldier from Kiryat Arba who took part in the fighting Friday night.

He said he heard shooting break out just as he was returning to the settlement from prayers. He grabbed his weapon, ran back down the road, threw himself onto the ground and, together with the Israeli troops, began firing into an olive grove where the attackers were thought to be hiding. The grove was uprooted the next morning.

Stern said he did not intend to engage in any vigilante action against the Palestinians but wouldn’t be surprised if his fellow settlers did.

“People here believe there has to be an answer to a very serious attack like this one,” he said.

Caught between the two sides was the Israeli military, which, in addition to being on guard against revenge attacks on the Palestinians, was taking up the painful task of investigating how seasoned soldiers had allowed themselves to be lured into a dark, dead-end street where the Palestinian gunmen managed to pick them off one by one.

The deaths represented the Israeli security forces’ largest loss of life in a single incident since April, when 13 soldiers died in a Palestinian ambush inside the Jenin refugee camp.

“We must learn what really happened here, on a tactical level,” said Col. Noam Tibon, who replaced his slain colleague, a close friend, as the Israeli commander in Hebron. Without elaborating, he said, “I guess there were some mistakes.”

In recent weeks, Hebron had been touted by Israeli commanders as a success story of sorts. Amid sweeping crackdowns elsewhere in the West Bank, the city had remained quiet after occupying Israeli troops pulled back and curfews were eased.

Now, a tight clampdown could continue indefinitely while the army hunts for those it holds responsible for the attack. Troops rounded up nearly 50 Palestinian men Saturday, blindfolding suspects and loading them onto army buses.

“We will find, we will catch and we will destroy Islamic Jihad and Hamas cells in Hebron,” Tibon said.

Similar open-ended operations have been going on in the northern West Bank cities of Nablus and Jenin, where dozens of wanted men have been arrested this month. In Jenin’s refugee camp Saturday, a 17-year-old gunman, brother of a slain Islamic Jihad leader, died in a shootout with Israeli troops.

Israel acknowledges that a prolonged army presence in a crowded civilian area can easily lead to accidental deaths. In Nablus, a 20-year-old woman, Samar Shrab, was killed Saturday as she leaned out the window of her home. The army apologized for her death, saying that troops had fired at a wall to deter Palestinians from breaking the curfew and that a fragment had ricocheted.