GAZA, 8 March 2003 — Israeli forces seized a band of territory in the northern Gaza Strip yesterday, effectively setting up a security zone in what the army called an open-ended campaign to thwart Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel.
“We will remain for as long as is necessary...and if we decide to hold on to this territory for a long time, we will,” Col. Yoel Strick, commander of Israel’s northern Gaza brigade, told Army Radio.
The creation of what Israeli Army Radio dubbed a security zone came on the heels of a raid on a Gaza refugee camp on Thursday in which 11 Palestinians were killed, bloodshed that followed a bombing that killed 15 people in Israel.
Palestinian security sources said at least a dozen Israeli tanks and other armored vehicles backed by helicopter gunships pushed some two km into the Gaza Strip from the northern Erez border crossing.
The force rolled to the edge of Jabalya refugee camp, where Thursday’s bloodbath took place, and the town of Beit Hanoun, establishing an armored triangle of observation posts and roadblocks that put some 10,000 Palestinians under Israeli guns.
Recent operations in Gaza have drawn international criticism over civilian casualties and fueled Palestinian fears that Israel’s new rightist government will reoccupy all of the Strip while world attention is focused on possible US war on Iraq.
The army said in a statement that the new Gaza deployment “was part of an attempt to...prevent the launching of Qassam rockets toward Israeli communities near the northern Gaza Strip”.
Three of the rudimentary rockets slammed into the southern Israeli town of Sderot on Thursday, causing no casualties, hours after the crushing raid on Jabalya.
The seizing of parts of northern Gaza marked a growing escalation in the strip that began Feb. 15, when Hamas blew up a tank in the area, killing four Israeli soldiers. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed in Israeli incursions since then.
Late at night, Palestinian gunmen infiltrated a Jewish settlement near the West Bank city of Hebron and opened fire, killing at least three people and wounding eight. Israeli military sources said that security forces shot dead two of the attackers and were searching for others in the Kiryat Arba settlement.
The two gunmen were killed after holing up inside a building in the settlement’s religious seminary, Army Radio said. Soldiers rushed to the scene and ambulances sped away with the wounded.
Earlier, Israeli troops killed three Palestinians. Israeli security services also announced the arrest of a top bomb-maker of Hamas.
