Israel Seizes Two Suspects From Hospital, Strikes Gaza

In raids staged hours apart Tuesday, Israeli forces snatched two wounded Palestinian militants before dawn from hospital beds in the northern West Bank city of Nablus and hammered a crowded Gaza City street with missiles at dusk in an unsuccessful attempt to kill a pair of Hamas field operatives.

An elderly storekeeper standing on the sidewalk was killed and at least two dozen other bystanders were injured in the Gaza attack, Israel’s third such missile strike in six days.

The two incidents drew sharp criticism from Israeli human rights activists, who raised concerns of a pattern of recklessness in the army’s pursuit of Palestinian fugitives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military, however, defended both operations as part of a necessary campaign to hunt down militants believed to be plotting terrorist strikes before they have a chance to carry them out.

Israel embarked on a wide-ranging offensive against Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade after a bus bombing in Jerusalem on Aug. 19 killed 21 people, six of them children. The bomber, dispatched by Hamas, targeted a city bus carrying families of observant Jews home from prayers at the Western Wall.

The latest plunge into violence collapsed a unilateral cease-fire declared June 29 by the Palestinian militant groups and left in doubt the future of the American-backed peace initiative known as the road map.

In the hunt for fugitives and weaponry, Israeli tanks and armor have pushed into several West Bank cities, soldiers with dogs have staged house-to-house searches, and military curfews have confined thousands of Palestinians to their homes.

The two men taken from Rafidiya Hospital in Nablus had been there as patients since Friday, when Israeli troops riddled their hide-out on the hospital roof with gunfire. Both underwent surgery for serious wounds, hospital officials said.

According to accounts of witnesses on the hospital staff, the Israeli troops, some of them disguised in Arab dress, burst into the hospital shortly after 3 a.m. and ordered nurses to take them to the wounded men.

Doctors and other nurses on duty were confined to a few rooms during the raid.

Witnesses said the soldiers took the men’s medical files, broke the electronic lock on the intensive-care unit, loaded the pair onto gurneys and wheeled them to waiting military ambulances.

“It was very, very uncivilized behavior,” said the hospital’s director, Dr. Husam Jawhari. He said the men, who were taken off respirators a day earlier and had been in critical condition immediately after surgery, were in no condition to be moved.

The army said the two were taken to a Tel Aviv hospital, where their condition was described as moderate.

An army spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal, blamed the captured militants for “using the hospital as a cover for their operations” before being wounded, and he defended their abduction as a safeguard against escape.

“For us, it’s very important to be able to speak to these people to find out what they were planning and who they were planning it with, and also to keep them in custody,” he said.

The army used fully equipped intensive-care ambulances and the lives of the two men were never in danger, Dallal said.

The men, both members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, are accused of planning and carrying out attacks on Israelis.

The Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights issued a strongly worded protest, saying the army’s actions violated international law and medical neutrality.

But it also criticized the militants for disregarding the safety of hospital staff by hiding out on the roof.

The Gaza missile attack came shortly before 7 p.m. in a neighborhood adjoining the teeming Jabaliya refugee camp, on the city’s northern outskirts.

The two Hamas men who were targeted, apparently alerted either by the sound of an Apache attack helicopter or a telephoned warning from comrades, leaped from their car as missiles slammed into it. One suffered light wounds and the other was unharmed, according to sources in Hamas.

White-hot fragments sprayed the crowded street, witnesses said, killing the owner of a tobacco and pipe shop as he was taking the evening air on the sidewalk. Many of the wounded, including several children, were on their way home for dinner or returning from evening prayers.

The targeted men were members of the Hamas military wing, Izzidin al-Qassam, and were part of a unit responsible for the firing of crude, ineffective, homemade rockets toward Israeli towns and Jewish settlements in Gaza. Israeli security sources said the attack was primarily aimed at Khaled Masoud, whose brother, a Hamas field commander, was killed in an Israeli raid this year.

Members of Hamas -- rank and file and top echelon alike -- have been lying low since Israel’s assassination Thursday of senior leader Ismail abu Shanab, who was killed along with his two bodyguards in a missile strike on his car. A similar strike on Sunday killed two Hamas field operatives and two other militants.

The surge in violence coincides with the struggle between Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and President Yasser Arafat over control of the Palestinian security forces.

Arafat named an ally, Brig. Gen. Jibril Rajoub, to the post of national security advisor Monday, which was widely interpreted as a move to limit the powers of Abbas’ security chief, Mohammed Dahlan.