Violence Dips, but Israel and Hamas Sharpen Words

March 1, 2008

Violence Dips, but Israel and Hamas Sharpen Words

By STEVEN ERLANGER

JERUSALEM — It was a day of threats and protest on Friday in Israel’s conflict with Hamas, with considerably less violence and death than over the previous two days, when more than 30 Palestinians died, five of them children, and one Israeli died in the border town of Sderot.

Tens of thousands of Gazans protested Israel’s repeated raids to halt persistent Palestinian rocket attacks; the Israeli deputy defense minister threatened Hamas with a catastrophe; the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, brushed aside Israeli threats to aim at political leaders; and another Palestinian died from wounds received Thursday.

An Israeli military operation aimed at rocket-launching squads near Jabaliya wounded four people, including two children and their grandmother, Dr. Moawiya Hassanain of the Gazan Health Ministry said.

Five more Palestinians were wounded when a rocket they were trying to launch exploded.

At least 13 rockets were launched Friday from Gaza toward Israel, the Israeli military said. Five landed in Sderot, one hitting a house and lightly wounding a woman. Four others were treated for shock. Two rockets hit the Sderot cemetery.

But no industrially made Katyusha-style rockets were fired on Friday, after at least eight, smuggled in from Egypt, were fired at the Israeli city of Ashkelon on Thursday. Israel says the rockets were probably made in Iran, but the Gazans do not have the mobile launchers normally used for them.

Putting Ashkelon, a city of 120,000 people some 10 miles north of Gaza, under a persistent threat of rocket attack increases pressure on the Israeli government to respond in force. Israel has activated a rocket-warning system for Ashkelon like the one in Sderot, which gives residents about 20 seconds to find shelter.

The Israeli deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, told army radio that Israel would respond to escalation and that “we will not shy away from any action” to halt the rocket fire on Israeli civilians. He called Hamas leaders irresponsible, and said they knew that “by intensifying the rocket fire and extending their reach they are bringing onto themselves a worse catastrophe, as we will use all means to defend ourselves,” including a major ground operation.

Mr. Vilnai used the Hebrew word “shoah,” meaning catastrophe or holocaust, and rarely used for anything other than the Nazi extermination of the Jews.

A spokesman for Mr. Vilnai said he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has been reluctant to order a major ground operation in Gaza, in part because it would be hard to stop rocket fire without reoccupying most of the strip, from which it withdrew in the summer of 2005. With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice scheduled to visit Israel next week after a stop in Egypt, which has been counseling restraint, Mr. Olmert would be unlikely to order a major move now.

In any case, the army would prefer warmer weather, when skies are clearer. But Israel has been sending messages to its allies that it may have to resort to a ground operation. Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in the messages that “Israel is not keen on an offensive, but Hamas is leaving us no choice,” the newspaper Yediot Aharonot reported.

In Ashkelon on Friday, Mr. Barak said Hamas “will be the one to bear the cost of our response.” But he also told Western diplomats that a major offensive was not “imminent,” a diplomat said on the condition of anonymity.

Inside Gaza, the situation is worsening, Khaled Abdel Shafi, an economist there, said in a telephone interview. Still closed to normal commerce, Gaza has severe shortages of oil, gasoline, medicine and chlorine for drinking water, he said.

“There is no chance that the crossings are going to be opened again,” he said. “Israeli military operations are still taking place, and they only cause more poverty, despair, and will eventually cause a Palestinian reaction.”

Mr. Abdel Shafi criticized both Hamas and Fatah. “They are both attached to their political stances, but the victim is the Palestinian citizen who is suffering from poverty and this division.”

Parallel to the fighting, there has been a diplomatic effort between Egypt and Israel, aided by the European Union and the United States, to negotiate a deal with Hamas. The idea, European and Israeli diplomats say, is to offer to reopen the Gaza-Egyptian border at Rafah under renewed European monitoring, allow Gazan exports through Rafah, push the Egyptians to patrol the border better, release a captured Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, and arrange a cease-fire in Gaza, if Hamas promises to stop the rocket attacks.

Even a cease-fire would allow Hamas to continue to build up what is essentially a Palestinian Army on the Hezbollah model.

At the Hamas rally in Gaza, a legislator, Fathi Hamad, urged the Hamas military wing to develop Qassam rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv.

Prime Minister Haniya of Hamas called the threat of an Israeli offensive “craziness and hysteria.”

“Gaza today faces a real war, a crazy war led by the enemy against our people,” he said. He accused Arab governments of “encouraging the Israeli aggression” through silence and criticized Washington for supporting Israeli attacks as “legitimate self-defense.”

The Israeli opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud, said Israel had not hit Hamas hard enough to force it to halt the rocket fire. “I think we have been fighting essentially a war of attrition,” he told CNN in New York. “They do something, we do something and so on. And the nature of deterrence, of course, is that you change the rules.”