JERUSALEM, 14 May 2004 — Israel’s biggest military loss in two years looks certain to boost the voice of a majority that thinks keeping the Gaza Strip costs too much blood.

But there was little sign the killing of 11 soldiers by Palestinian militants would give Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s beleaguered Gaza pullout plan decisive impetus, as influential opponents took the deaths as a prop for their own arguments.

“I see it as a ghastly mess. This debate could go around and around,” said Rosemary Hollis, of London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs.

The US-backed withdrawal plan at stake was badly holed in a May 2 referendum defeat by members of Sharon’s right-wing Likud party — despite polls showing it has the support of most Israelis and even a majority of Likud voters. Israeli opponents of uprooting Gaza’s Jewish settlers call the plan a “reward for terror” while many Likud members reject ceding land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

“I don’t want my son to be merely a victim of the registered Likud members,” said Shlomo Vishinsky, a well-known actor whose son Lior was among five killed in a Gaza ambush on Wednesday. Six soldiers were killed a day earlier in an ambush of another armored vehicle that horrified Israelis, as militants brandished their remains before television cameras.

A test of whether Israel’s shock translates into a political shift comes this Saturday when campaigners for a Gaza withdrawal gather for what they want to be a huge show of support. If more than a few thousand people turn up it could prove significant for a peace movement whose relevance has sunk during a 3-1/2-year-old conflict as Palestinian suicide bombings hardened Israeli opinions. “It is difficult to tell when a drowsy mass will become a sweeping citizens’ movement. But it appears several factors have joined that will force the state’s leaders to make a decision,” said Yaron London, of the best-selling Yedioth Ahronoth daily.

Many Israelis have long seen Gaza as a costly liability. The 7,500 Jews living there among 1.3 million Arabs compare to more than 230,000 settlers in the West Bank, which is home to at least two million Palestinians, who fear a pullout from Gaza would be at the cost of land they want for a state.

A surge of Israeli support for leaving Gaza might help Sharon push his unilateral “disengagement plan” through an eventual national referendum to trump the Likud vote. But foes of the pullout plan have also proved they can draw big crowds. They took this week’s attacks as a clear warning that Israel could not afford to retreat under fire.

The word “Lebanon” — practically a curse in the Israeli Army — was on many lips. Troops pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, after years facing guerrilla attacks which increased popular pressure to withdraw. Many Israelis suspect that pullout emboldened Palestinian militants to start an uprising months later. The fear is that if Israel now left Gaza, it could both encourage Islamic militant groups sworn to destroying Israel and give them a safe launch pad for attacks. “I am in favor of a political solution, but any political solution must begin with the feeling they have lost,” said Health Minister Danny Naveh.

Some also argue this week’s attacks would have happened with or without a Gaza withdrawal plan. The Israeli Army’s Tuesday raid was to destroy workshops making rockets fired into Israel as well as at Gaza settlements. Wednesday’s blast was in a zone on the Egyptian border Israel plans to keep in any case, to stop weapons smuggling into Gaza.

Regardless of political developments, the attacks have made Gaza a yet more worrying prospect for conscripts sent to serve there and their families back home. At least 35 Palestinians have been killed in three days of violence and the lower Israeli toll was no consolation for the Jewish state. Some commentators suggested the political to-ing and fro-ing and the fact that Sharon had already made clear his own wish to get Israel out of Gaza would do nothing to shore up the morale of soldiers wondering what they are doing there.

“The army is carrying out an almost impossible mission in almost impossible conditions,” said Yom Tov Samiya, a reserve general and former Gaza Strip commander.