12 Palestinians Die as Clashes Rage Dawn to Dusk in Gaza

Israeli forces pressed ahead Saturday with one of the biggest offensives in the Gaza Strip in four years of fighting, killing at least 12 Palestinians in dawn-to-dusk gun battles and airstrikes, officials from both sides said.

But, despite the presence of more than 2,000 Israeli soldiers and scores of armored vehicles in a 6-mile-deep strip of northern Gaza, fighters from the Islamic group Hamas held a rare news conference in the heart of the battle zone and pledged to mount rocket strikes against cities deeper inside Israel.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, speaking on Israel’s Army Radio late Saturday, described the offensive as open-ended.

In the fourth day of the confrontation, both sides fortified their positions around the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp, the focal point of the clashes. The Israelis rolled in armored reinforcements overnight, while Palestinian militants could be seen readying positions on top of slum buildings in the camp.

Fighters from Izzidin al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, appeared at a mosque in the middle of Jabaliya, declaring that they would direct rocket fire at the Israeli city of Ashkelon.

The Israeli offensive was triggered by volleys of crude homemade Kassam rockets fired by Palestinian militants at the Negev desert town of Sderot, less than two miles from the heavily fortified border with Gaza. Four Israelis, three of them young children, have been killed in the rocket barrages since late June.

Ashkelon, a larger coastal city, is about eight miles north of Gaza. In the past, the militants have managed to hit only its industrial outskirts, but they claim their rocket technology is steadily improving. Israeli intelligence has said so as well.

At the news conference, four men in green Hamas headbands, their faces swathed in scarves, sat at a table arrayed with grenades, rocket launchers and antitank shells. With the whir of Israeli helicopters clearly audible, they scoffed at the idea of Israeli forces being able to move freely in the half-mile-square camp, which is home to more than 100,000 Palestinians.

“They call this ‘Days of Reckoning,’ ” said one of the masked militants, deriding the code name for the Israeli military operation. “They’ll see reckoning from us.”

“We will resist,” another said. “They can’t be here in this camp.... We will teach them a lesson they will not forget.”

Both sides have staked considerable prestige on the outcome of this confrontation. Sharon, even as he seeks to pull Israeli troops and Jewish settlers out of Gaza over the next 15 months, wants to prove that the Israeli military can hit back hard whenever Palestinian militants strike inside Israel.

Hamas, for its part, considers Jabaliya its home ground. The Palestinians’ first intifada, or uprising, began here in 1987, and the impoverished, squalid camp has always been a fertile recruiting ground for militant groups.

After intense street battles Thursday and Friday between Palestinian militants and Israeli troops, Saturday saw a return of some semblance of normality to the camp. Only a few hundred yards from a line of Israeli tanks, people crowded the main market to buy pita bread and tomatoes.

More than 50 Palestinians have been killed in four days of fighting. Israel says the majority were combatants, but Hamas said only 20 of them were fighters. Three Israelis have died.

Among Palestinians, there is no consensus that the rocket attacks help their cause. Many residents strongly support Hamas and other groups even as they blame the militants for bringing the wrath of the Israeli army upon their neighborhoods.

Ahmed Korei, the Palestinian Authority prime minister, called on the militant groups Saturday to “think about the higher national interest and not give Israel excuses to continue the aggression against our people.”

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, also present at a Cabinet meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah, called the Israeli offensive a “monstrous, criminal, inhumane attack.”

In Israel, debate continued over the wisdom of launching an offensive in such a densely populated area of Gaza. The seaside territory, where clashes have claimed a disproportionate share of soldiers’ lives over the last several years, is widely viewed as a quagmire.

“Hamas has led us into a trap,” former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told Israel Radio on Saturday. “We should have avoided going into Gaza.”

Some in Sharon’s conservative Likud Party, including Cabinet Minister Tzipi Livni, suggested that Palestinians living in Jabaliya should have done more to prevent Hamas operatives from using their neighborhoods as bases.

“Palestinian society is being punished by definition because the Palestinian civilian population made the terrorists and the Kassams into heroes,” Livni said.

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Special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Jabaliya contributed to this report.