Israel Raids Gaza Camp as Sharon Shores Up Coalition

Israeli troops and tanks backed by combat helicopters pushed their way into a Palestinian refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday, killing at least nine Palestinians and wounding scores of others, hospital officials said.

Overnight, the Israeli air force struck two buildings in Gaza City that the army described as suspected weapons workshops. No injuries were reported.

Continuing unrest in Gaza has been causing political headaches for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as he seeks to move ahead with his plan to uproot the Jewish settlements in the seaside strip next year. The prime minister lost his parliamentary majority during infighting over the proposed Gaza withdrawal and has been trying to shore up his conservative government through an alliance with the left-leaning Labor Party.

Israeli news reports said Friday night that a deal had been reached to grant Labor eight Cabinet positions, including the job of deputy prime minister for party leader Shimon Peres. A formal coalition agreement was expected to be signed Sunday, Israel’s Channel One said.

Opponents of the withdrawal plan say violence in Gaza underscores the need for Israeli forces to maintain a tight grip on the territory to prevent it from becoming a staging ground for attacks against Israel. The plan’s supporters say the Mediterranean enclave is a quagmire from which Israelis should extricate themselves as soon as possible.

Although at least five of the nine Palestinians killed in the Israeli incursion into the Khan Yunis refugee camp were fighters from militant groups, the raid was precisely the type of military operation -- an overwhelming show of force in an area packed with civilians -- that Israeli officials had hoped to avoid in the run-up to the Jan. 9 Palestinian presidential election.

The Khan Yunis camp, a sprawling enclave of rundown alleys and concrete-slab buildings only yards from the Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim, has in recent days been used by as the launching site for mortar attacks against Jewish settlers.

A young Thai woman working at another settlement was killed in such a barrage this week.

Israeli military officials suggested that the operation in Khan Yunis was open-ended.

“More than 50 mortar shells were fired at Jewish communities in the last week,” Col. Ofer Winter, an Israeli army commander in Gaza, told Israel Radio. “This is unacceptable. So long as our residents have no peace, neither shall theirs.”

As the Israeli troops moved into the camp, hundreds of panicked Palestinian civilians fled their homes in darkness and freezing temperatures, Palestinian officials said.

“They shelled our neighborhoods and broke the windows, and then they called us by loudspeaker to leave our homes,” said Lubna Asfour, 34. “We didn’t have a chance to take anything with us.”

Palestinian hospital officials said at least 40 were wounded during the incursion, besides the nine killed. Witnesses said three of the fatalities were believed to be civilian bystanders.

A spokesman for the Khan Yunis municipality, Jamal Abed, said about 600 people had been given shelter at a United Nations school and a hospital.

Separately, at least five Palestinians reportedly were rescued after the collapse of a weapons-smuggling tunnel near Gaza’s border with Egypt. The frontier area is honeycombed with such subterranean passageways dug by militants to ferry guns, ammunition and high explosives into the coastal strip.

In an unusual step, Israel granted passage to Palestinian ambulances and rescue crews called in to save those trapped in the collapsed tunnel. On at least one previous occasion, Israeli troops have participated in rescue efforts when a tunnel collapsed amid heavy rains.

Militant groups have come to rely on their network of underground cross-border smuggling routes, which often extend for nearly a mile.

Technology borrowed from the construction of these pathways for weapons and other goods has been used over the last year to tunnel near and attack Israeli military outposts.

Times special correspondent Rushdie abu Alouf in Gaza City contributed to this report.