OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 21 February — Israel killed 18 Palestinians in a blistering series of raids, airstrikes and clashes yesterday in Gaza and the West Bank as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon approved yesterday an increase in the scale and variety of military strikes, an Israeli political source said.
The strikes for the first time hit Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Gaza City headquarters, strafed by a warship, killing four of Arafat’s bodyguards and injuring four others.
Fourteen others were killed in separate incidents.
The series of attacks and counter-attacks have been one of the bloodiest convulsions of violence since the Palestinian uprising broke out in September 2000.
The latest deaths came in the afternoon yesterday when Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinians alleging that they were planting a bomb along the fence separating Israel from the southern Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials said the raids and airstrikes were a retaliation for Tuesday night’s attack which killed six Israelis.
Israeli planes hit Arafat’s Gaza compound, with Palestinian security officials reporting an attempted beach assault by Israeli marines on the building, but there was no independent confirmation.
Minutes after the first strike, an F-16 fighter-bomber blasted Gaza City police headquarters and Apache helicopters launched five hours of strikes.
They fired 20 missiles at targets across the city, including a civilian building quartering policemen and Arafat’s heliport, which was hit in December.
Nine Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops in the northern West Bank city of Nablus, six of them by shelling. A Palestinian man was killed near the 0entrance to the Balata refugee camp on the edge Nablus in the West Bank.
In Ramallah, one security man was killed at a Palestinian outpost, and the second one died as a result of Israeli shelling.
Clashes continued as Palestinian police and gunmen took to the streets to battle the Israeli tanks posted outside the town. Israeli Apache helicopters fired three more missiles at the Palestinian security compound in the city late yesterday, which was already flattened by previous airstrikes, Palestinian security officials said. The army also sealed off all Palestinian towns, cities and villages, and shot one man trying to cross a checkpoint in Ramallah, seriously wounding him.
The Palestinian leadership called for an emergency session of the UN Security Council to address the massive upsurge in the conflict with Israel.
