Israel Attacks Suspected Bomb Factory After a Blast Is Averted

Israeli helicopters attacked a suspected bomb factory in the Gaza Strip early today, hours after Palestinian fighters blew up an Israeli tank, killed two soldiers and tried to plant a huge car bomb in Israel.

The Palestinians launched their assaults Thursday despite heightened Israeli security before the Jewish New Year that begins tonight, saying the attacks were retaliation for Israel’s killings of Palestinian civilians.

Israel hit back with a helicopter missile strike that left a metal workshop in flames in Khan Yunis, a city in the western Gaza Strip, witnesses said. Hospital officials said there were no casualties. The Israeli military said the target was a weapons factory.

Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told a meeting of his Labor Party that Israel would not return occupied areas of the strip to Palestinian Authority control, as agreed last month, his spokesman said.

Israelis were shaken by the magnitude of the attempted car bomb attack that was prevented early Thursday when volunteers helping police spotted two vehicles racing along a dirt road near the West Bank, just inside Israel.

After a brief pursuit, the drivers abandoned the vehicles and escaped, and police found a bomb with 1,300 pounds of explosives in one of them, a small truck. A huge cloud of orange flames and smoke filled the sky as a bomb squad blew up the truck in an open field.

A bomb that size, far larger than any that has exploded in Israel during the two-year-old conflict, could have brought down a large building, officials said.

The attack on the tank in Gaza was a two-stage operation that began with a nighttime rocket assault, drawing Israeli forces into the area, the military said.

A tank that went with other forces to search the area ran over and detonated a huge bomb, blowing the turret off, killing the driver instantly and trapping two soldiers under the three-ton turret, said the unit commander. It took five hours to extricate the two from the burning tank.

About the same time, a Palestinian gunman approached a road used by Israeli soldiers in the northern part of the Gaza Strip and opened fire on a jeep, killing an officer and wounding a soldier. The military said it chased the gunman and shot him dead.

In Tel Aviv, Marwan Barghouti, a key leader of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, officially went on trial on charges of murder, attempted murder and terrorism and became the highest-ranking Palestinian official to face an Israeli civil court.

He wore a brown prison uniform and represented himself to underline his rejection of the right of the Israeli court to try him. “The one who should be sitting here [as a defendant] is the government of Israel,” Barghouti told the three-judge panel in fluent Hebrew, learned in previous spells in Israeli prisons.

Israel accuses Barghouti of orchestrating terror attacks that killed 26 Israelis, ranging in age from 8 months to 79 years.