Israelis Pursue Attackers in Gaza

Five Palestinians were killed in a clash with Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, after a two-day barrage of Palestinian mortar shells and missiles aimed at Jewish settlements inside the coastal strip and at communities on its fringes.

More than 30 Palestinians and four Israeli soldiers were injured during the skirmish, which took place near a Palestinian refugee camp in the northern end of the Gaza Strip.

The encounter occurred as Israeli forces sought to root out militants responsible for firing a total of 15 mortar shells and crude missiles at neighboring Jewish settlements inside the Gaza Strip and at least two communities in Israel.

The barrage, after Israel’s assassination Saturday of Hamas leader Abdulaziz Rantisi, focused mainly on a northern Gaza Strip settlement, Nisanit, and injured nine Israelis, Israeli military officials said. Four houses and a grocery store were damaged.

Mortar rounds and missiles are routinely launched at the Gaza Strip settlements, home to 7,500 Jewish residents, but rarely cause injury. The number launched since Sunday was unusual, Israeli officials said.

Hamas vowed retaliation for the slaying of Rantisi, who was killed in a missile attack by an Israeli helicopter near his home in Gaza City. The first Palestinian mortar shells began falling in the northern Gaza Strip hours after his funeral, which drew tens of thousands of mourners amid calls for retribution.

In Tuesday’s action, Israeli soldiers hunting for the source of the mortar strikes met resistance from Palestinians who fired weapons and hurled rocks, grenades and Molotov cocktails, the Israeli military said.

Medical officials in Gaza City said five Palestinians had died and more than 30 had been hurt, several of them seriously.

The latest violence in the Gaza Strip occurred as Israel was debating a proposal by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to evacuate all 21 Jewish settlements there and four in the West Bank. Sharon’s Likud Party is to hold an internal vote on the proposal May 2.

President Bush’s endorsement last week of Sharon’s plan, in which Israel refuses to accept Palestinian claims to ancestral homes in Israel, caused Jordanian King Abdullah II to postpone until next month a White House visit originally planned for today.

But on Tuesday, Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher said that a flurry of telephone calls, letters and a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had assured him that there were no “problems” between his nation and the U.S.

Powell used a public appearance after his session with Muasher in Washington to elaborate on Bush’s endorsement, saying “all elements of final status have to be mutually agreed on” by Israelis and Palestinians, but in the context of “certain realities” -- a reference to the low probability that Israel would relinquish all its settlements or allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return to Israel.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said of Abdullah’s postponement: “Look, we understand that there are some domestic issues involved here. And we respect King Abdullah’s decision to postpone it, postpone the meeting for a couple weeks.”

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, meanwhile, said in an interview published in a Paris newspaper Tuesday that hatred of Americans in the Arab world was stronger because of the war in Iraq as well as U.S. support of Sharon.

“After what has happened in Iraq, there is an unprecedented hatred and the Americans know it,” he told Le Monde. “There exists today a hatred never equaled in the region.”

Sharon argues that an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip will reduce friction with the Palestinians and eliminate the burden of defending a piece of land that Israel is unlikely to retain in any permanent peace agreement. His proposal has gained momentum in recent days because of support from Bush and the killing of Rantisi, who Israeli officials said was a mastermind behind Hamas suicide attacks against their country.

Right-wing opponents of the Sharon plan, including some Likud officials, say withdrawing would amount to a reward for terrorism. Hamas has cast the proposed withdrawal as vindication of the militant group’s campaign of armed resistance.

But the head of Israeli army intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, told a parliamentary panel Tuesday that the proposal would help reduce attacks on Israeli targets and could help rein in militant groups in the West Bank by forcing them to reach accommodation with the Palestinian Authority on governing Gaza after an Israeli withdrawal, Israeli media reported.

Zeevi-Farkash said Hamas had been left in a state of “anarchy and shock” after Israel’s assassinations of Rantisi and his predecessor, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Yassin, who founded Hamas in 1987, was killed in an airstrike March 22.

Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Washington, special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Gaza City and Associated Press contributed to this report.