Israeli raid fails to slow rocket strikes

As Palestinian rockets were falling on the Israeli border town of Sderot earlier this year, people turned to the community’s most powerful citizen, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, for protection.

“All my friends would come to demonstrate against me outside my house,” recalled Peretz, a former mayor of the town. “They asked why I was not sending in the army in full force.”

This week, Sderot’s 24,000 nerve-racked residents got what they wanted -- an assault by hundreds of infantry troops on nearby Beit Hanoun, the Gaza Strip launching ground for most of the Kassam rockets that Palestinian militants fire into Israel almost daily.

The soldiers, who moved in Wednesday with tanks and helicopter gunships, remained in control of the town early today.

But instead of relief, the beleaguered Israeli community, where six residents have died in three years of attacks, got more rockets. It was the largest two-day barrage in months.

Since the start of the Israeli siege, militants elsewhere in the Gaza Strip have retaliated with at least 17 rocket strikes in or near Sderot, wounding three people, damaging cars, a house and the public library, and forcing some schools to close.

The continuing rain of the crude and imprecise rockets has baffled Israel’s leadership, raising questions about the effectiveness of the army’s tactics in Gaza and its 2-day-old occupation of Beit Hanoun.

At least 12 militants, five Palestinian civilians and one Israeli soldier have been killed in the operation, Israel’s first takeover of a Gaza town since its army and settlers pulled out of the coastal territory in September last year.

A separate Israeli airstrike on a car near Gaza City early today killed three militants, including Amar Mushtaha, identified as a senior rocket forces commander for Hamas, the Islamic movement that governs the Palestinian territories.

Israeli forces resumed raids into Gaza in late June after the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants. The soldier’s fate remains unknown.

The Kassam rocket attacks, which peaked in the spring after the militant group Hamas’ electoral victory, decreased after June but intensified again last month.

Hamas has done little to halt the rocket fire, calling it a legitimate act of resistance.

Beit Hanoun, a farming community of 37,000 people, has become known as the “Kassam capital.” Several Israeli communities are within rocket range of the town. The rockets are little more than metal tubes filled with simple fuel and topped with a tiny warhead. They take just a few seconds to reach Sderot, less than three miles away.

After dominating clashes in Beit Hanoun on Wednesday, Israeli forces continued firing Thursday on suspected militant hide-outs.

Israeli troops with loudspeakers ordered all male residents ages 16 to 60 to gather in a soccer stadium for an interrogation aimed at finding out if they were involved in militant activity. Residents said scores of men were released and others taken away for more questioning.

In a dramatic showdown, Israeli troops and tanks surrounded a mosque where about 70 people, including 13 militants, were holed up and twice opened fire on a crowd of women who stood in their way as human shields, residents said. Two women, one identified as an unarmed militant, were killed.

Palestinian medical workers said two male noncombatants, ages 18 and 65, were killed in their homes Thursday by Israeli sniper fire.

A Palestinian couple and their six children were wounded when an Israeli tank shell struck their home, the medical workers said. One of the children, a 4-year-old boy, died of his wounds early today.

Peretz, the Israeli defense minister, said in an interview this week that avoiding civilian casualties in Beit Hanoun was “very complex” because the militants had embedded themselves in residential areas. He said the assault was aimed at rooting out as many launch teams as possible “and conveying to the Palestinians the clear message that we are intent on stopping this rocket fire.”

Israeli critics of the mission said it would only deepen the cycle of Israeli-Palestinian conflict without achieving deterrence.

“If there is no intention to remain in Beit Hanoun over time, what will happen on ‘the day after’? “ columnist Hagai Huberman asked in the Israeli newspaper Hatzofe. “Who will prevent the terrorists from rebuilding their rocket arsenal after we leave?”

Doubts about the operation also pervade the Israeli government, which is sharply divided over whether the army should launch a full-scale reoccupation of Gaza.

The rockets are just one element of an arms buildup by Hamas, which has also been smuggling more sophisticated weaponry into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt, officials said.

“There is nothing we haven’t tried already in Gaza, and I’m sorry to say that the situation there is worsening,” Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the minister of national infrastructure, told Israel Radio. “I expect the defense establishment to think more deeply and try something more creative.... The Kassams keep falling.”

Capt. Noa Meir, an army spokeswoman, said the siege of Beit Hanoun was part of a wider assault on the militants’ rocket arsenal in Gaza. She said a helicopter gunner had destroyed a Kassam launcher near Gaza City on Thursday as it was about to fire.

“It’s not surprising that the terrorists are reacting to this operation by trying to show us that they can shoot harder,” she said. “But we have no choice. We cannot sit back while they terrorize our citizens.”

In the interview, Peretz said he hoped the operation would put enough pressure on Hamas “to create a diplomatic margin, room in which to maneuver” toward renewed peace talks.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, whose Hamas movement refuses to recognize Israel, declared Thursday that the Israeli campaign was “aimed at crushing the Palestinians’ spirit” but was “sure to fail.”

In Sderot, where rocket alarms awaken people almost every night, some residents said they were angry at Israeli leaders and Palestinian militants. They said the government had neglected to reinforce schools and other buildings to withstand the rockets.

The army on Wednesday ordered an indefinite suspension of classes in all schools in Sderot except the few made of reinforced concrete. Parents are demanding that the 5,400 affected children be sent to schools elsewhere in Israel.

“Some of the kids are just wandering the streets, which is dangerous,” Batya Katar, head of the town’s Parent Teacher Assn., said in a telephone interview.

“The Palestinians are warning us that we had better clear out because they are going to bomb us. What is the government waiting for -- for a child to be killed?”

boudreaux@latimes.com

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Batsheva Sobelman of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau and special correspondent Rushdi abu Alouf in Gaza City contributed to this report.