JERUSALEM, 12 May 2004 — Palestinians blew up six Israeli soldiers riding in an explosives-packed armored personnel carrier during a raid in the Gaza Strip yesterday in the deadliest ambush against Israeli forces in nearly two years.
The armored vehicle was torn apart after troops and tanks backed by helicopter gunships stormed a densely populated neighborhood of Gaza City, killing seven Palestinians and wounding 122.
Senior Islamic Jihad political leader Khader Habib said the fighters were holding the soldiers’ mangled body parts and would not release them until there was a total halt to Israeli raids and Israel opened talks on release of jailed fighters.
Soldiers searched house-to-house, and the army vowed to stay until all of the remains had been recovered.
Gunfire and explosions continued into the evening hours.
After the lethal ambush, Israelis fired a helicopter missile into another part of the city. Hamas said its fighters had been targeted but escaped unhurt. Medics said an 18-year-old bystander was killed and five people were wounded.
The fresh cycle of violence followed a May 2 vote by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s rightist Likud party against his plan to pull out of Gaza, where 7,500 Jews live in settlements amid 1.2 million Palestinians on land taken in the 1967 Middle East War.
The army said it had struck at the “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza behind a series of attacks, including the killing of a settler and her four daughters on May 2.
The troop carrier, loaded with explosives, ran over a powerful, improvised mine and was “blown to pieces”, a senior military official said.
It erupted in a massive fireball that mushroomed above buildings in the Zeitun district, a Hamas stronghold that lies north of the fortified Jewish settlement of Netzarim.
The strike was likely to drive a deeper wedge between Israeli hard-liners who say a Gaza withdrawal would be a “reward for Palestinian terror” and a majority of Israelis who see the fenced-in Gaza Strip as a costly liability that should be abandoned.
The troop carrier was torn apart as invading Israeli forces entered Zeitun. Hamas said its fighters ambushed the vehicle, stopping it with an anti-tank missile and then detonating bombs planted at the spot.
The blast sprayed body parts in all directions. A masked Hamas gunman displayed what he said were soldiers’ remains in a blood-stained plastic bag.
Israeli Gen. Dan Harel told a news briefing: “We are searching house-to-house, every roof, every balcony to find pieces of the personnel carrier and the bodies... Our commitment is to bring them to burial and when we succeed we will leave.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had agreed to the army’s request to act as an intermediary.
Recovering the bodies of Israelis killed in violence is of utmost importance to the Jewish state on political and religious grounds.
— Additional input from agencies
