Soldier dies in Israel’s Gaza raid

Hamas dealt Israel its first combat death in nine months Thursday during an Israeli army raid on a stronghold of the Islamic movement’s military wing in the Gaza Strip.

The clash occurred a year after the start of Israel’s 34-day cross-border war with Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon and underscored the Jewish state’s difficulties in confronting Islamic adversaries on its doorstep.

Hamas took a lesson from that war -- how to effectively use rockets against civilians to undermine Israeli self-confidence. But Israel faces the same limits in Gaza that it encountered in Lebanon last summer, when it failed to crush Hezbollah or bring back two captured soldiers.

Since then Israeli leaders have been wary of Gaza: A full-scale occupation of the Palestinian coastal territory could leave the army bogged down in costly battles, as it was in Lebanon, while too much restraint might signal that its psychological defeat last summer had eroded Israel’s deterrence capability.

The raid before dawn in the Bureij refugee camp was an example of a middle-ground strategy Israel has adopted to try to blunt rocket fire from Gaza and what officials call a large-scale stockpiling of weapons smuggled by Hamas from Egypt.

The camp, near Gaza City, lies about 500 yards from the Israeli border, within range of the periodic but brief “pinpoint” incursions staged by Israeli ground troops. Like previous incursions, the latest one was backed by helicopters and fighter planes.

Hamas’ armed wing, the Izzidin al-Qassam Brigade, said its fighters detonated two large mines and fired rocket-propelled grenades as Israeli troops neared the camp.

The Israeli army said Staff Sgt. Arbel Reich, 21, was killed and two other soldiers wounded.

Israel detained dozens of Palestinians and seized weapons in house-to-house searches. Two Palestinians were reported wounded by Israeli aircraft fire.

A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami abu Zuhri, said Palestinians have a right to defend themselves.

“We expect that these incursions will continue but will be limited because wider offensives always fail and the occupiers pay a heavy price,” he said.

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A weapons buildup

Israeli officials said the raids have increasingly targeted weapons factories and desert smuggling tunnels, not just the sites from which Hamas and smaller militant groups have fired hundreds of crude rockets into southern Israel in recent years, killing at least 10 Israelis.

Capt. Noa Meir, an Israeli army spokeswoman, said Hamas had brought 30 tons of weapons-grade explosives into Gaza this year and was “armed to the teeth right on the other side of the border.”

The Hamas buildup in the nearly two years since Israel’s withdrawal of troops and Jewish settlers from Gaza has resembled Hezbollah’s stockpiling of weapons in Lebanon after Israel’s pullout in 2000, Israeli officials said. The two Islamic movements, which advocate Israel’s destruction, have close ties.

Aside from rockets, Israeli officials said, Hamas has acquired antitank missiles like those Hezbollah used effectively in Lebanon last summer, built Hezbollah-style concrete bunkers in Gaza, recruited a 10,000-member paramilitary force and obtained a small number of ground-to-air missiles.

“The process of Hamas growing stronger demands some sort of solution on our part,” Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli army chief of staff, told parliament recently. “It involves large quantities of arms and an increase in the level of their operational planning.”

Advocates of a reoccupation of Gaza have raised their voices since mid-June, when Hamas defeated the secular Palestinian movement Fatah after months of factional fighting. Hamas has full military control of Gaza and more freedom to bring in weapons.

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Options debated

Yuval Steinitz, former chairman of the parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said Israel should “recapture” Gaza long enough to destroy rocket factories and kill or capture most of the Palestinian militants.

The leader of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has urged the government to prepare for a major incursion into Gaza and proposed a total closure of the territory, including a cutoff of electricity, water and fuel.

Other Israelis have counseled restraint.

“We occupied Gaza for 38 years and couldn’t turn it into a better place,” said Efraim Sneh, a former deputy defense minister. “We shouldn’t get bogged down there. The damage would far outweigh the benefit.”

Shlomo Brom, a senior research associate at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, said Israel would face widespread criticism if it took over Gaza once more.

A spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah said the leader “totally rejected and condemned” Thursday’s limited incursion.

A broader Israeli offensive in Gaza would add to Hamas’ heroic appeal in the Fatah-dominated West Bank, undermining Israel’s effort, backed by the U.S., to isolate Gaza and build up the West Bank as a prosperous partner for peace talks, aides to Abbas said.

But those limited Israeli incursions are likely to intensify. Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, indicated as much when he took the job last month. Barak makes no secret of his ambition to become prime minister for a second time.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert toured Israel’s northern border Thursday and declared last summer’s war a success, saying it had ended with Hezbollah’s military capacity damaged and a United Nations peacekeeping force patrolling the Lebanese side of the line.

Olmert was wounded politically by an investigative panel’s findings that his leadership in that conflict was inadequate.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the military officers who led the war were forced to resign, and the prime minister is widely considered to be a lame duck.

“Clearly Barak cannot stop Hamas’ rocket fire, but he is pushing for an enhanced defensive capability,” said Michael Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research institute.

“We’ll see more operations in Gaza and on a larger scale. Barak is building his candidacy around this. He’s doing this to unseat Olmert.”

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boudreaux@latimes.com

Special correspondent Fayed abu Shammaleh in Gaza City contributed to this report.