Six Killed in Israeli Raid in Gaza Strip

Backed by helicopters and a column of tanks, the Israeli army punched into the Gaza Strip on Saturday in a nighttime raid that left an Israeli soldier and five Palestinians dead -- including a teenage boy, witnesses and hospital officials said.

Soldiers inside dozens of armored vehicles rumbled into the Rafah refugee camp from at least two directions and came under heavy return fire, witnesses reported. The incursion began about 9:30 p.m. and concluded early today.

At least 30 Palestinians were injured, medics said. Among the dead was a 14-year-old boy identified by Palestinian sources as Mahmoud Abu Koush. Israeli radio reported today that the dead also included a local leader of the radical Islamic group Hamas, Mohammed Abu Shamla. The Israeli soldier died when Palestinians returned fire.

As helicopters buzzed overhead, Israeli forces appeared to concentrate their operations on two sections of Rafah known to be strongholds of Islamic militants belonging to groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israeli troops went from house to house and in some instances ordered entire families to evacuate, witnesses reported. Three homes were demolished, as were two tunnels believed to be used to smuggle weapons into Gaza from neighboring Egypt, Israeli radio said.

Electricity was cut in large areas of the densely packed camp, and ambulances had trouble reaching victims because of the ongoing firefight, sources said.

The incursion was one of Israel’s biggest in Gaza during the bloody 2 1/2-year-old Palestinian uprising, or intifada. It came at a sensitive point in Israeli-Palestinian relations, as Washington gets ready to unveil a Middle East peace initiative.

U.S. officials are waiting for the prime minister-designate of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to name a Cabinet before they unveil the initiative. The Bush administration has expressed its support for Abbas -- a moderate who has questioned Palestinian violence as a response to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank -- as an alternative to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

The Israeli government, too, had cautiously welcomed Abbas’ appointment. The incursion followed a brief period of quiet in Gaza, a regular site of violent clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants. Earlier this month, Israel launched two missile strikes within two days of each other in what it called targeted attacks on known militant leaders.

Although in both cases the intended targets were killed, at least four bystanders died and dozens were injured. Palestinians denounce such attacks as assassinations.

In addition, an American student activist was killed and a British activist critically wounded in the last month while they were trying to stop Israeli military activity in Gaza.

Saturday’s deaths in Gaza were not the first Palestinian casualties of the day. In the West Bank city of Nablus, a Palestinian cameraman was shot dead as he filmed a tense standoff between stone-throwing youths and an Israeli tank that had stalled in an alley.

Nazeh Darwazeh, 43, was freelancing for Associated Press Television News when a bullet struck him just above his right eye, killing him instantly.

Witnesses said an Israeli soldier deliberately fired on a cluster of journalists, including Darwazeh, after they ducked into a doorway to protect themselves from flying rocks and bullets.

The journalists had been filming efforts to tow a stalled Israeli tank from a narrow road while Palestinian youths hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at the vehicle.

A spokeswoman for the Israel Defense Forces said Palestinian gunmen mingled with the stone-throwers and were also shooting when Darwazeh was hit, but journalists on the scene and Palestinian witnesses rejected that charge.

In video shot by a Reuters cameraman standing beside Darwazeh during the melee, a man in army fatigues crouches between a wall and an armored vehicle and then fires in the journalists’ direction.

Fatima Kalabany said she had opened her front door to the journalists so they could take refuge just inside. She later cleaned Darwazeh’s blood from her front step.

“I took the bone [fragments] from his head and I put them together on a newspaper. I felt his soul was there. I didn’t know him, but I felt like I buried him,” she said.

Doctors said 15 people were injured in skirmishes throughout Nablus on Saturday morning, including the clash where Darwazeh died. The victims included several teenagers and a 10-year-old boy.

APTN demanded that the Israeli military conduct a “full and speedy” inquiry into Darwazeh’s death.

Maj. Sharon Feingold, an Israeli army spokeswoman, said fighting broke out as Israeli troops were withdrawing from the historic old city in Nablus, where they had arrested two suspects, a potential suicide bomber and her alleged “dispatcher,” overnight.

When the tank stalled, a throng of stone-throwers descended, she said, prompting Israeli troops to fire on the crowd using rubber bullets and then live ammunition from “light weapons.”

“When these media people put themselves purposefully in combat zones, they’re not only risking their own lives but [the lives of] our soldiers,” Feingold said.

Besides Darwazeh, three other journalists have been killed in the line of duty since the intifada began in September 2000. They were an Italian freelance photographer, a Palestinian freelance photographer and a reporter for the Voice of Palestine. All of the earlier deaths were attributed by witnesses to Israeli gunfire.

Darwazeh’s death also followed heavy casualty figures among reporters working in Iraq, where 13 journalists died while covering the U.S.-led war.

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Times staff writer Chu reported from Jerusalem and special correspondent Morris from Nablus.