Israel Arrests Five in Suicide Attack

Responding to the first suicide bombing in nearly five months, Israeli forces backed by attack helicopters and armored vehicles pushed into the West Bank city of Tulkarm and arrested several suspected militants, authorities said Wednesday.

The troops also were involved in a shootout that a Palestinian official said left one Palestinian police officer dead and another critically wounded.

Separately, Israel sealed off Jewish settlements slated for evacuation in the Gaza Strip, a closure that officials said would remain in effect until the end of the pullout, which is due to begin in a month. Israeli officials called it a necessary measure to prevent activists from inundating the area and disrupting the withdrawal plans through protests or violence.

The army’s sweep through Tulkarm came as another victim in Tuesday’s suicide bombing died of her wounds. The death raised the toll to four in the attack outside a shopping mall in the city of Netanya. Several dozen bystanders were injured.

Military sources said Israeli forces had arrested five suspected members of Islamic Jihad in Tulkarm. The Palestinian militant group claimed responsibility both for the Netanya blast and for a failed car bombing minutes before in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Shavei Shomron. Israel said the men also had been involved in a Feb. 25 suicide bombing outside a Tel Aviv nightclub.

During the raid, Israeli soldiers found themselves under fire and shot back, hitting at least one of the shooters, the army said. The soldiers were slightly injured.

The suspected gunmen, however, turned out to be Palestinian police officers, said Izzeddin Sharif, the governor of the Tulkarm area.

One of the officers was killed; the other remained on life-support systems. The circumstances surrounding the shootout were not immediately clear.

Tulkarm had been turned over to Palestinian control four months ago. Criticizing the Israeli incursion as unnecessary, Sharif insisted that the Palestinian security services had the city under tight rein.

“They have nothing to do here,” Sharif said of the Israeli military, which is expected to occupy Tulkarm for the next few days. “There is no need for them to stay.”

The bomber in Tuesday’s attack in Netanya hailed from Atil, a village just outside Tulkarm in an area that remains under Israeli control.

Sources in Tulkarm said the bomber’s father had been arrested Wednesday in addition to the suspected Islamic Jihad members.

The bombing punctured a period of lessened violence since an informal truce was reached involving Palestinian militias and the Israeli government.

Although extremist groups such as Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade have largely adhered to the cease-fire, Islamic Jihad has continued to carry out sporadic attacks. Israel has said that those assaults make the group’s members fair targets for arrest and even assassination.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told reporters Wednesday that he had authorized Israeli security services “to launch a relentless attack against the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization and its commanders,” a vow met with defiant warnings of counterattacks by the group.

Analysts fear that Islamic Jihad is trying to sabotage Israel’s announced plan to uproot Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank.

Israeli authorities also are concerned about increasingly disruptive and violent tactics by Jewish militants opposed to the pullout, including a handful of fake bomb scares in recent days. Stories of hundreds of evacuation foes slipping into the Gaza Strip to set up camp, as well as plans for a huge protest march next week on Gush Katif, the main settlement block, helped push Israeli officials to Wednesday’s decision to seal off the area to anyone but residents and a limited number of their guests.

A previous closure two weeks ago, while authorities cleared out a hotel taken over by activists, was only temporary. Angry over Wednesday’s announcement, settlers in Kfar Darom blocked the departure of a visiting Israeli Defense Ministry official for several hours, Israeli radio reported.

Benzi Lieberman, a leader of the settler movement, demanded that the government rescind the closure, calling it “the first time in history that a Jewish leader was placing a Jewish area in Israel under siege.”

But the government declared that it had no choice.

“We have no desire to close it off before the date of the evacuation,” Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Tuesday, before the decision was made. “But if there will be events and processions and marches inside Gush Katif or northern Samaria [West Bank] whose aim is to increase the number of residents and make it more difficult for the [army] and Israeli police to evacuate the residents, then we will close off the strip.”

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Special correspondent Maher Abukhater in the West Bank city of Ramallah contributed to this report.