Israel Moves Against Low-Tech Attacks

The time and the place may vary, but the method stays the same. Two or three Palestinian men, usually masked, arrive by truck or on foot in some quiet corner of this agricultural village. The fruit-laden trees provide cover as they swiftly set up a launcher no larger than a camera tripod.

Within moments, a resounding boom echoes across fields and rooftops, and another Kassam rocket -- an unguided, 5-foot-long homemade projectile, so crude it is little more than a flying pipe bomb -- is airborne. The men are gone even before the puff of black smoke has time to dissipate.

In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian militants have sought to hone a classic guerrilla technique: using a low-tech weapon to harry a more powerful conventional army.

Palestinian militants, mainly from the group Hamas, have managed to make Kassam rockets a chief preoccupation of the Israeli army in Gaza, despite the more serious threats troops there face, military analysts say.

Many in Israel have long dismissed the danger from Kassam rockets as negligible. But recently, the random launches have taken a lethal turn.

On June 28, in the Israeli desert town of Sderot just outside the boundary with Gaza, one of the rockets landed in front of a nursery school, killing a 3-year-old and injuring his mother. A bystander also died.

Until then, Palestinian militants had launched more than 320 of the rockets without causing serious damage. But the recent deaths have made it impossible for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to ignore demands that Kassam launches be choked off once and for all.

“It’s not that we didn’t know that the Kassam was dangerous, but it’s more obvious and concrete now that people have been killed,” the Israeli daily Maariv quoted a senior military official as saying this month.

Because they have a range of only about six miles, the rockets must be fired from a narrow swath of northern Gaza to have any chance of hitting inside Israel. But in many ways, the terrain of crumbling urban neighborhoods and farming villages is ideal for militants.

Kassams “couldn’t be more primitive,” said Eran Lerman, a former military intelligence officer. “But that’s the advantage. You can make the rocket tube out of a signpost. You can carry it on the back of a donkey.”

Israel typically responds to volleys of Kassams with a temporary military takeover of the areas used as launching pads -- the outskirts of the sprawling Jabaliya refugee camp outside Gaza City, and the villages of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun.

After the deaths in Sderot, Israel sent in troops and tanks backed by combat helicopters to seal off Beit Hanoun, an agrarian community of 30,000 people.

In an operation that has lasted more than two weeks, Israeli troops have used bulldozers to raze olive and orange groves, seized civilian homes as lookout posts and killed at least 15 Palestinians, most described by the army as militants. However, hospital officials said the dead included a number of noncombatants.

With the village largely cut off from the outside world, Palestinians say the humanitarian situation is worsening daily, and those who try to alleviate it find themselves in harm’s way.

On Wednesday, the United Nations said a food convoy had come under fire. The Israeli army acknowledged firing shots in the vicinity but said its troops were aiming at Palestinian gunmen. No one was injured.

Even with Israeli forces deployed around Beit Hanoun, the militants have managed to keep firing rockets. A barrage fell near Sderot even as Sharon, who has a ranch nearby, was visiting to reassure residents.

As it has in other Palestinian areas considered militant strongholds, Israel tried, with little success, to persuade locals to cooperate with the army.

Pink leaflets dropped by helicopter -- bearing a message that the “people who fire the rockets don’t care about your safety or property” -- were torn up, spat on and trampled underfoot.

In an area where most of the farmers have tilled their land for generations, the razing of hundreds of acres of orchards has triggered rage and despair.

“I’m not angry at Hamas, I’m angry at the Israelis,” said Fakh- ri Masri, pointing toward the twisted stumps of his orange grove. “When you are occupied, you have to resist. That is what the fighters are doing.”

Several villagers interviewed on condition of anonymity acknowledged that they had often seen the militants carrying out launches. They described the process in some detail, pointing out fields, groves and hillocks that had clear sight lines toward the red roofs of Sderot.

“They come, they set it all up in five minutes,” one man said. “And then khalas -- finished.”

Despite the array of high-tech surveillance methods at their disposal, including aerial drones and long-range night-vision binoculars, Israeli forces have been unable to thwart the launches.

“Technologically speaking, the [military] has no means of intercepting a Kassam once it’s been fired,” military analyst Amir Rappaport wrote in Maariv. “Therefore the only possibility is to hit the launcher cells.... But they can’t count on consistent success, due to the high cost of keeping helicopter gunships in the air around the clock, seven days a week.”

Israel frequently targets workshops in Gaza City where it says Kassams are manufactured, and claims a high rate of success. But Palestinians insist that many of these strikes, usually carried out at night with helicopter-fired missiles, have instead wrecked ordinary industrial sites.

For many Israelis, the notion of establishing a long-term “security zone” in the north of Gaza is unpleasantly reminiscent of the buffer zone in south Lebanon where Israeli troops struggled for years against Hezbollah guerrillas. Israel withdrew from the border zone in May 2000.

Another fatal Kassam strike could provoke a heavy Israeli military response. After the deaths in Sderot, Sharon reportedly had to be talked out of ordering artillery strikes.

“We expect escalation, and we expect it will only get worse and worse,” said Sufian Hamid, the Palestinian administrator of northern Gaza. “There’s no solution. There’s no way to make it stop.”