BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip, 21 May 2003 — Israel yesterday relaxed its military grip on an area of the Gaza Strip where the first steps could be taken to fulfill a US-backed peace plan.
Witnesses said the Israeli Army pulled out of Beit Hanoun, a northern Gaza town it swept into last Thursday in what it described as an open-ended operation to prevent Palestinians firing homemade rockets into southern Israel.
At least eight Palestinians, half of them under the age of 18, were killed in the Israeli push into the town. The raid was met by fierce resistance from gunmen.
Before leaving, Israeli forces destroyed 10 houses — four belonging to families of fighters — tore up roads, severed telephone lines and uprooted thousands of trees.
As the soldiers pulled out, the army distributed leaflets warning residents not to cooperate with the fighters. “The Israeli Army will continue to operate in Beit Hanoun and anywhere in the Gaza Strip against terrorists who turned your houses and fields into launching areas for firing Qassam rockets against innocent people,” the leaflets said.
Abdel-Aziz Rantissi, a senior Hamas leader, said the group would end its rocket attacks on southern Israel and Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip only when Israeli forces stopped their assaults in Palestinian areas.
“Rockets aim to respond to raids, and they do not come first,” he told Reuters.
Beit Hanoun is in a border area that Israel said it wanted to hand over to Palestinian security control as a proving ground for new Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas’ commitment to the peace road map and its requirement to disarm and arrest gunmen.
A meeting between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Saturday yielded no agreement on implementing the peace plan and its series of reciprocal, confidence-building measures meant to spawn a Palestinian state in 2005.
Aides to Sharon said he planned to meet Abbas again, although no date had been set.
US President George W. Bush phoned Abbas yesterday for their first conversation that was “friendly and hopeful”, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said in Washington.
“The president reiterated his vision...for two states living side by side in peace and the president reiterated the absolute need for all parties to fight terror,” he said.
On Monday Bush said he would persevere with the plan despite the new attacks but predicted the way would be “bumpy”.
Showing their defiance of Abbas and opposition to negotiated co-existence with Israel, militants from the West Bank have mounted five bombings against Israelis in three days.
The latest, an attack on a shopping mall in northern Israel on Monday that killed three people, was carried out by a 19-year-old Palestinian woman.
Palestinian security sources said Hiba Darghmeh, a student of English literature at a West Bank university, was a devout Muslim whose brother had been in Israeli custody for nearly a year.
They said militants from President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction recruited her for the mission, and the radical Islamic Jihad group had armed her with an explosives belt.
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Monday that Israel would consider banishing Arafat if he stymied Abbas’ professed intention to rein in the militants leading a 31-month-old uprising for statehood and implement reforms for peace.
US and Israeli officials have high hopes for Abbas, but he was installed under pressure by international mediators, lacks street popularity and has tussled with Arafat in trying to consolidate his power.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a Fatah offshoot, and Islamic Jihad both claimed responsibility for the Afula attack in which Darghmeh blew herself up when challenged by security guards.
Arafat condemned the violence and denied trying to wreck the peace plan, embraced by Abbas but objected to by Israel on security grounds. “We hope we will continue with the road map which has been declared by President Bush and accepted by the Quartet,” Arafat said.
