Israel Says Only Hand-Over Will End Fight

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday defended his government’s handling of the latest conflict in the Gaza Strip, saying the military offensive would continue until Palestinian militants freed a captured soldier and ceased firing rockets into Israel.

In forceful language, Olmert again ruled out a prisoner swap with Hamas to win the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was seized by Gaza militants June 25 during a cross-border raid.

“I will not negotiate with Hamas,” Olmert told foreign journalists during a session focused almost solely on Israel’s 2-week-old incursion into Gaza. The operation has been a major military test for his new government, which is widely perceived as light on security credentials.

Olmert said there was no timetable for ending the offensive, which has consisted of numerous airstrikes, limited incursions into villages and some urban zones in northern Gaza, and heavy shelling of areas from which militants frequently launch Kassam rockets. About 55 Palestinians and an Israeli soldier have died in the fighting.

“I will stop when I will feel that I can provide security for the people of Israel,” Olmert said.

In Gaza, the conflict continued to simmer Monday. An Israeli airstrike near the southern town of Khan Yunis killed two militants identified by Palestinian sources as members of the group Islamic Jihad. Earlier, a gunman was killed in an Israeli aerial attack on the outskirts of Gaza City, near the main commercial crossing at Karni.

An Israeli airstrike near the northern Gazan village of Beit Hanoun killed three teenagers, all civilians, Palestinian officials said. Witnesses said the three were at a spot from which Islamic Jihad militants had just fired a rocket and left behind the launching device. The youths might have been mistaken for fighters, they said.

Israeli forces also aimed artillery barrages at northern Gaza after Palestinian militants early Monday fired three rockets, which landed harmlessly in Israel. Along the Mediterranean coast off Gaza City, Israeli gunboats fired warning flares at fishermen who strayed too far offshore.

Olmert rebuffed criticism that Israel has used excessive force during the offensive, including an attack on a power plant that caused widespread electricity outages and hardship. He said no other nation would have withstood cross-border rocket fire without acting.

Olmert said he had “no particular desire to topple the Hamas government,” despite airstrikes against Hamas-run ministries, the arrests of two dozen Hamas lawmakers and threats to target the group’s leaders, including Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

Hamas militants were among the three groups that claimed to have seized Shalit, the missing soldier.

His capture, coupled with a jump last month in the number of Kassams fired into towns in southern Israel, has presented the 2-month-old Olmert government with its first military crisis. It has proved a key test in particular for Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, both of whom took office with little expertise in security and military affairs.

Their inexperience in military matters was a major topic when the coalition government was formed after Olmert’s centrist Kadima party won national elections.

Military credentials go far in Israel, where some past prime ministers, such as Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, were former generals.

The new team’s handling of the Gaza crisis has been watched carefully by an Israeli public that placed broad trust in Sharon, Olmert’s predecessor, during five years of conflict with the Palestinians.

So far, the verdict has been mixed. Critics have questioned whether the government has a long-term strategy that will keep Israel from being dragged back into Gaza for good after troops and settlers were withdrawn last summer, although Olmert and Peretz have won praise by some for a relatively measured military response.

Some commentators have accused Olmert of shrillness in his threats toward Hamas while others have attacked the prime minister’s refusal to negotiate Shalit’s release. Even before the incursion, the Olmert government was under fierce criticism from leaders in the southern Israeli town of Sderot and others over what they saw as inaction in response to daily rocket strikes.

A poll published in the daily newspaper Maariv on Friday, more than a week after Israeli troops reentered Gaza, found only 43% of respondents satisfied with Olmert’s performance, compared with 47% dissatisfied. The figures for Peretz, who leads the left-leaning Labor Party, were worse: 28% satisfied and 64% dissatisfied.

But there were signs of improvement. Israeli media reports said Peretz, who holds dovish views and had been mocked for his lack of savvy on military matters, performed impressively during Sunday’s Cabinet discussion on the Gaza operation.

“This entire show by Peretz, which was received with approbation by the ministers, does not change Israel’s current security situation in the Gaza Strip, but from his standpoint, he was able to put a first large check mark in his notebook yesterday,” journalist Ben Caspit wrote in Monday’s Maariv.

Olmert said Sharon, who has been comatose since suffering a massive stroke six months ago, would have supported his decisions so far. “I’m sure that if Sharon had been with us, he would be 100% behind me,” Olmert said.

Shlomo Aronson, a political science professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said Olmert, a lawyer by training, and Peretz, a former labor union leader, have settled on a middle course that allows them to answer the rocket strikes militarily, but without large-scale casualties on both sides.

“I would say most Israelis believe this is the right compromise,” Aronson said. “They are not doing stupid things. At the same time, they are not sitting on their hands. And they are not negotiating with Hamas, which would have been ruinous to them politically.”

The fate of Olmert’s main campaign promise -- to draw Israel’s permanent borders, unilaterally if necessary -- is likely to be influenced by the outcome in Gaza. Hawkish Israelis cite the rocket attacks as evidence that the Gaza withdrawal was a mistake and that any Israeli pullback in the West Bank would be misguided.

Olmert said Monday that he remained committed to the plan, known variously as convergence or realignment, under which Israel would abandon isolated West Bank settlements while tightening its grip on thickly populated blocks closer to the Israeli border. He said separation between the two people was the “only solution” leading to creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

But Gidi Grinstein, president of the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv-based policy group, said Olmert’s “convergence logic” was at odds with Israel’s refusal to regard Hamas as a key player on the Palestinian side. Israel can give up large swaths of the West Bank only if it can hand it to a functioning Palestinian Authority, even one that is dominated by Hamas, Grinstein said.

“The moment of truth is coming,” he said.

Olmert reiterated his stance against a prisoner swap with Hamas. He said making a deal with the radical Islamist group would undermine moderates, such as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

News reports have said that Hamas’ exiled leader, Khaled Meshaal, would support a prisoner swap and cease-fire as part of an agreement under which Israel would end the incursion and promise not to target Hamas leaders. Mediation efforts by Egypt and Turkey have failed to break the deadlock.

At a news conference Monday in Damascus, the Syrian capital, Meshaal insisted on the release of jailed Palestinians in exchange for Shalit.

“The solution is simple: Swap. But Israel rejects this. The mediators in Europe know this, but they are incapable,” Meshaal said, according to Reuters news service.

Olmert labeled Meshaal, who is based in Damascus, as “a terrorist with blood on his hands.”

Times staff writer Laura King in Gaza City contributed to this report.