Israel can't stop rocket attacks

By Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press

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JERUSALEM — Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip managed to fire more crude rockets at an Israeli border town yesterday, even as Israeli troops and armor inundated a large swath of the seaside territory in a bid to halt such attacks.

The death toll in the wide-ranging 6-day-old Israeli incursion, code-named "Days of Reckoning," was nearly 80, with the number of wounded above 200, according to Palestinian hospital officials and an Israeli human-rights group.

The raid was launched after two Israeli children were killed last Wednesday by a rocket from northern Gaza.

The humanitarian situation was reported to be worsening in the Jabaliya refugee camp, the focal point of the confrontation. The squalid, sprawling site — a tangle of grit-choked alleyways and concrete-slab slum buildings — is home to more than 100,000 Palestinians. With fighting raging around them, many in the camp are running short of food, water and medicine, medical officials said.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia yesterday condemned what he called international indifference to Palestinian suffering in the face of the Israeli offensive.

Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz acknowledged that even the presence of about 200 Israeli armored vehicles and more than 2,000 troops in a 6-mile-deep zone in northern Gaza hadn't stopped Palestinians from firing Kassam rockets, crude projectiles that essentially are flying pipe bombs.

The rocket attacks usually are mounted by two or three Hamas fighters who then disappear into Jabaliya's labyrinth of narrow streets before Israeli forces can pinpoint the source of fire.

Israel has sent unmanned drones, helicopters and warplanes to spot launch sites, but in the camp, rugs and blankets were draped over alleyways, and piles of burning tires sent black smoke billowing into salty air.

The Israeli human-rights group B'Tselem put the death toll during the incursion at 75 as of yesterday, including 19 people under the age of 17. In increasingly blunt fashion, Israeli officials put Palestinian civilians on notice that they would be the ones to suffer if the fighters continued to use Gaza neighborhoods as a base of operation.

"I believe the time has come for the Palestinian population to think where it is headed," Col. Eyal Eisenberg, commander of the Givati Brigade, told Israel Radio.
 
But defying the fighters is a dangerous affair. In a widely reported incident in July, a Palestinian teenager was slain in northern Gaza when his family tried to stop a group from firing rockets from their property.

Also yesterday, Israelis cited comments by a U.N. official to back their claim that the U.N. agency in charge of Palestinian refugees was harboring terrorists.

The Israeli army released video taken over the Gaza Strip that it said showed Palestinian fighters loading a rocket into a U.N. vehicle. Peter Hansen, of U.N. Relief and Works Agency, accused Israel of fabricating the story.

But Israeli officials seized on an interview Hansen gave the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC), in which he acknowledged that some of his U.N. Relief and Works Agency's (UNRWA) approximately 24,000 Palestinian employees probably were members of militant groups such as Hamas.

"I'm sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll," Hansen said in the CBC interview that aired Sunday. "I don't see that as a crime."