Palestinian Infiltrators Kill 2 in Settlement

With yarmulkes on their heads and guns in hand, a pair of Palestinian militants disguised themselves as Jewish seminary students, infiltrated a West Bank settlement and unleashed a volley of rifle fire Friday night. At least two people, a husband and wife, were killed and three were wounded in the outpost of Kiryat Arba before the gunmen were shot dead.

The militant group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, and this morning, two Israeli helicopters struck back, firing missiles into a car in Gaza City and killing Ibrahim Makadma, a man identified as a Hamas leader, Palestinian sources said. Three other men in the car, apparently his bodyguards, also were killed.

The United States has called for calm in this turbulent region while the threat of war hangs over the Middle East -- but the Sabbath attack came amid swelling violence and deteriorating tempers. A week of back-and-forth bloodshed has felled Israeli and Palestinian civilians, some of them children. In three separate flare-ups of deadly tension, a total of seven Palestinian militants were gunned down Friday trying to attack Jewish settlers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

It was late Thursday when Israel began to make good on threats to retake Gaza, sending soldiers, tanks and bulldozers to seize a strategic swath of turf in the northern farmlands. The army said troops in the new “security zone” would clamp down on local militants who fired crude rockets into Israel.

But Palestinians worried that the arrival of tanks and bulldozers portended a gradual reoccupation of the Gaza Strip. Some Israeli officials have spoken this winter of their desire to reoccupy the region, which is notorious as an untamed hotbed of Palestinian radicalism.

“The plan is to create a situation here that is completely different than what was before,” Col. Yoel Strick, commander of the northern brigade in Gaza, told Army Radio. The tactic of firing the much-celebrated, relatively ineffective Kassam rockets is “intolerable,” Strick said, “and carries a very high price tag, including holding on to areas that until a day ago were Palestinian Authority areas.”

Dozens of tanks moved into Gaza before sunrise Friday. Soldiers set up a hilltop base with clear views of the major roads in northern Gaza, then established three smaller bases behind walls of bulldozed sand, witnesses said. The soldiers also flattened ripe orange groves belonging to Palestinian farmers -- the army says it needs to strip the land of any dense foliage that could camouflage snipers.

The new security zone puts thousands of Palestinians under Israeli guns.

“They called to us over loudspeakers to get out, and then they searched all the buildings using dogs,” said Mansour abu Hamad, a 33-year-old lawyer who lives in nearby Beit Lahiya.

It’s been just days since the most recent rocket attack on Sderot, an Israeli town that has taken the brunt of the Gazan rockets. Hamas took responsibility for this week’s attack on Sderot. And it was Hamas, too, that claimed the Sabbath attack in Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron.

Hours after sundown, two militants sliced the fence around Kiryat Arba and slipped inside. They had wrapped explosives belts around their torsos and donned the sober garb of religious Jews, and they made their way to the religious school. In the entrance, they encountered a married couple and gunned them down. The intruders shot two more settlers and a soldier before guards shot the assailants dead.

To militant groups like Hamas, the settlers who seize Palestinian land in the name of biblical inheritance are illegal invaders.

Earlier Friday, at the edge of the nearby outpost of Negohot, another pair of Palestinians died in a shootout with settlers. In Gaza, three militants opened fire on an army convoy escorting settlers on the road to Netzarim. Soldiers shot back and killed the trio, whom Islamic Jihad later claimed as members.

In a statement, Hamas promised to keep up the attacks against Israel. After two days of silence, the group also took responsibility for a suicide blast Wednesday aboard a commuter bus in Haifa. Fifteen people besides the bomber were killed in the explosion; many were high school students.

Hours after the carnage in the seaside city, Israeli soldiers stormed the Gaza refugee camp of Jabaliya. Troops fired a tank shell into a crowd of Palestinians, witnesses said, killing eight people -- many of them unarmed civilians. The army denied firing the shell.

The idea of reoccupying such a densely populated swath of land, with its fiercely militant leadership and poor populace, was until recently dismissed by Israel. The death toll would be too high, military leaders thought, especially in the crowded mazes of Gaza City and the packed refugee camps.

But as the violence drags on, the idea has gained currency in Israel. Palestinians fear that Israel will reoccupy Gaza while the furor over Iraq distracts the international community.