Toll Mounts as Israel Presses Gaza Offensive

Israeli forces fired a missile and tank shells toward a large crowd of Palestinian demonstrators in the Rafah refugee camp Wednesday in an attack that witnesses said killed at least eight people and injured dozens more.

Ten other Palestinians were reported killed in separate fighting, pushing the Palestinians’ two-day death toll in the Gaza Strip to more than three dozen.

The offensive, which Israel said it launched Tuesday to staunch weapons smuggling along Gaza’s border with Egypt, comes amid the bloodiest bout of urban warfare here in the more than 3 1/2 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Wednesday’s assault followed the bulldozing of dozens of Palestinian houses along an Israeli patrol road, an operation that has rendered about 1,600 Palestinians homeless.

Critics say Israel’s intensive military operations with battlefield weaponry -- including tanks, heavy machine guns and combat helicopters -- pose an unacceptable risk to civilians inside densely populated Palestinian areas.

Israel has said its operations in Rafah were meant to shut down what officials call a “gateway of terror” -- tunnels under the Egyptian border used to smuggle weapons.

The dramatic increase in violence in Gaza was reminiscent of the worst street battles of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, which took place in several principal West Bank cities two years ago.

In those clashes, terrified civilians also found themselves caught between a determined band of Palestinian guerrillas and the vastly superior strength of the Israeli army.

Coming against a backdrop of public debate over whether Israel should press ahead with a plan to withdraw from Gaza, the fighting inspired a new round of comparisons to southern Lebanon -- which is for many Israelis a code word for a blood-soaked quagmire from which the country took far too long to extricate itself.

Palestinian eyewitnesses said the first set of Israeli strikes appeared to have set off at least one explosion among the throngs of marchers protesting Israel’s offensive in the Rafah refugee camp. Chaos ensued as people in the crowd, some of them wounded and bleeding, rushed to carry away the most severely injured, including children.

“First the tanks shot toward us, and then the helicopters approached and circled over our heads, and there was a big boom,” said Ahmed Naim Zarab, a 15-year-old protester wounded in the leg. “I saw that I was hurt, and so many others too.”

Four Palestinians died in separate fighting earlier, and six others were killed in overnight missile strikes as Israel widened its onslaught into two more neighborhoods of the crowded camp, witnesses and medical officials said.

The deaths prompted calls for an immediate halt to the Israeli offensive, which came on the heels of Israel’s worst combat losses in Gaza since the start of the conflict. Thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed in three separate incidents last week, two of them in Rafah.

At the United Nations, the U.S., which usually blocks measures critical of Israel, took the rare step of abstaining from a Security Council resolution condemning the killing of Palestinian civilians. The measure, passed 14 to 0, also called on Israel to halt its bulldozing of Palestinian homes, something Israel has defended as necessary for its own security.

“We deeply regret the loss of life of innocent Palestinian civilians today in Gaza,” said Deputy U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham after the vote. Israel’s operations in Gaza “have worsened the humanitarian situation and resulted in confrontation between Israeli forces and Palestinians -- and have not, we believe, enhanced Israel’s security.”

The Israeli army expressed sorrow over the deaths of civilians, but top officials signaled that the operation in Rafah would continue. Fighting raged into the night, with heavy explosions and machine-gun fire rattling across the maze of cement-block homes.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- speaking at a ceremony commemorating Israel’s seizure of East Jerusalem, including the walled Old City, in the 1967 Middle East War -- did not directly refer to the fighting in Gaza. But he pledged to battle those “who harbor ill intent against Jerusalem and its people.”

The latest Israeli assault comes as Sharon is revising his plan to withdraw Jewish settlers from Gaza, rejected earlier this month by his own party.

Even some of the prime minister’s coalition allies openly criticized the offensive in Rafah. “This is a mistake and a human and diplomatic tragedy,” said Justice Minister Tommy Lapid, whose Shinui party is a partner in Sharon’s governing coalition. “This incident has ‘This cannot continue’ written all over it.”

Last week, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the army could destroy Palestinian buildings near an Israeli patrol road that runs along the Gaza-Egypt frontier if military commanders deemed the demolitions necessary for security reasons.

Palestinians, who have had high-level contact with Bush administration officials in recent days, called the violence in Gaza a disproportionate response to the threat posed by militants operating in the area.

“The only question is whether the international community is going to do something to protect the Palestinians from this kind of indiscriminate killings,” said Palestinian Cabinet minister Ghassan Khatib.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, speaking to reporters at his ruined headquarters in the West Bank, called the deaths “a massacre against humanity, against all civilized values.”

“This is a war crime!” he exclaimed in a shaking voice.

The attack took place near Tel Sultan, a neighborhood on the outskirts of the Rafah refugee camp. Israelis had moved into the area in full force more than 24 hours earlier, cutting it off from the central districts of the Rafah camp.

On Wednesday, trails of blood, together with dangling electrical wires, marked the scene of the deaths and injuries at a sand-strewn intersection called the Zaurob Crossing.

“I saw hands and severed legs on the ground,” said 28-year-old Palestinian worker Khalid Mahmoud Hijazi, who took part in the demonstration. “We were putting the injured on donkey carts because the ambulances could not get through.”

Doctors at the refugee camp’s main hospital said they were overwhelmed by the flood of injured. The morgue quickly filled up, and because the weather was so hot, a large refrigerator normally used for flowers was also used to store the dead.

The Israeli army said it was investigating the precise sequence of events as the marchers moved toward Tel Sultan.

The military acknowledged firing a missile and four tank shells in the vicinity of the march by several thousand Palestinians in the town of Rafah, but insisted it did not directly target the crowd.

The army said gunmen had mingled among the demonstrators, a claim scoffed at by marchers.

“We didn’t even have stones,” said Hijazi.

The army insisted that a helicopter had fired a single missile -- meant as a warning shot -- into an open field near the protesters. When the crowd continued to move forward, the military said in a statement, four tank shells were fired toward an abandoned structure at the side of the road.

Military sources said the area was littered with roadside bombs and explosives planted by Palestinian militants against advancing Israeli troops, and suggested that one of those devices could have been accidentally detonated by the marchers.

The Israeli military defended the degree of force being used during the operations that began early Tuesday.

“This is a war zone,” said Ruth Yaron, the army’s chief spokeswoman.

Danny Yatom, a former aide to ex-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, said: “I have warned in the past that while fighting in such crowded areas, perhaps the most crowded in the world, mishaps may happen, and one has indeed occurred.”

The Tel Sultan neighborhood on the edge of the Rafah camp, isolated early Tuesday by Israeli troops who moved in with armored vehicles and a large infantry force, remained without power and water, residents said.

Palestinians, together with the international organization Physicians for Human Rights, complained that ambulances had not been granted free passage on Tuesday and Wednesday to transport the wounded. The Israeli army denied that medical vehicles had been impeded.

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the attacks had “worsened the situation and, I think, made it more difficult for us to move forward and get back in the peace process.”

Powell said he and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice spoke to Sharon’s chief of staff in a conference call. Powell said he also spoke with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, and expected to speak to Palestinian leaders later in the day.

The White House said the incidents were a “grim reminder” of the need for Israel to disengage from Gaza.

King reported from Jerusalem and Abu Shammaleh from Rafah. Times staff writers Maggie Farley at the United Nations and Maura Reynolds and Mary Curtius in Washington contributed to this report.