Inside the modest complex, a slapdash collection of mobile homes scattered around a large asphalt parking lot, acrid smoke rose from the charred remains of one wooden structure that had taken a direct hit from a guided missile. Other Israeli rockets had slammed into three temporary structures a few meters away, smashing through the roofs like giant fists. As dozens of curious onlookers gathered on a hillside overlooking the buildings-offices and sleeping quarters for members of Yasir Arafat’s elite presidential guard-Palestinian security forces swept methodically through the wreckage. They were searching, they said, for the remains of a Force 17 guard who had failed to get out in time. “We are finding pieces of him here and there,” said a comrade who refused to give his name. “We are still looking for his hands.”
Last night’s precision strikes by helicopter gunships against Yasir Arafat’s henchmen followed a wave of terrorist attacks inside Israel that has terrified the population and tested the resolve of the new government led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. One month into the Sharon era, anxiety among Israelis is at its highest level since the intifada began, and the pressure is building on Sharon to demonstrate quickly that he can crackdown more effectively on terrorism than his predecessor, Ehud Barak.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank and Gaza, attitudes are also hardening. Voices calling for a new campaign of peaceful demonstrations have been stifled, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants have vowed to continue their violent resistance to Israeli occupation.
The renewed cycle of violence followed two weeks of relative quiet. Last Monday, Palestinian snipers shot to death a 10-month-old girl and injured her father as her family entered a Jewish settlement inside the West Bank town of Hebron. Then Palestinian militants proved once again that determined terrorists could carry their crusade into the heart of Israel. The following day, bombs injured more than a dozen people in the French Hill suburb of Jerusalem and in a busy shopping mall in the industrial neighborhood of Talpiot.
Then, in one of the worst attacks against Israelis since late September, a 23-year-old Palestinian walked into a crowd of teenagers waiting for a bus at Kalkiya Junction, southeast of Netanya, on Wednesday morning and detonated a nail bomb hidden inside his backpack. Two teenage boys, ages 14 and 15, as well as the suicide bomber died in the blast; three more were injured.
Shortly before 8 o’clock last night, Sharon struck back. Israeli Air Force helicopters took to the skies over Ramallah and Gaza. Unlike previous attacks, the Sharon government elected not to notify the Palestinian Authority that the strike was coming, apparently intending to cause casualties as well as material damage. Five rockets slammed into the Force 17 headquarters in Ramallah near the Palestinian Legislative Council Building; more missiles struck a Force 17 training base in south Gaza, an arsenal close to Gaza City and an armored-vehicle depot. “The IDF will not allow the harming of Israeli citizens and soldiers,” an Israeli Defense Force spokesman declared. “The IDF will use all means at its disposal in order to protect their safety and security.”
Israeli military sources claim that Force 17, whose core leadership trained alongside Arafat in Lebanon in the 1980s and who are responsible for guarding Arafat and maintaining security inside the territories, has emerged during the intifada as a leader of the campaign of terror against Israel. Members of the 3,500-man force, they say, have been responsible for fatal shootings of Israeli civilians on roads through the West Bank and mortar attacks on the Jewish settlement of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip and have turned a blind eye to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist cells operating in their zones. “Force 17 is perfectly able to control and monitor security in the West Bank if they wanted to,” says IDF spokesman Olivier Rafowicz. “But Hamas and Islamic Jihad operate there with total freedom. For us it’s a signal that Force 17 is deliberately closing its eyes-and sometimes acts as a terrorist group itself.”
It is an open question whether the strikes against Force 17 will tamp down the violence. Force 17 leaders insist that they have no control over Hamas and Islamic Jihad-and the militants have declared their determination to continue the struggle against Israel, whatever the cost. Despite the policy of “closure” enforced by the Israeli military, terrorists continue to cross the Green Line that separates Israel from the Palestinian territories. The suicide bomber who struck at Kalkiya Junction on Wednesday morning was able to walk into Israel carrying his nail bomb apparently without encountering a single checkpoint, and a Hamas spokesman warned that another seven “martyrs” were currently inside Israel preparing to strike.
The Israeli press reacted skeptically to last night’s attacks, dismissing them as a sop to a anxious population yearning for some signal of strength. “The government abruptly ended its policy of restraint yesterday by firing kid-glove rockets directly at the heart of Israeli public opinion,” opined a columnist in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth. “It is not these rockets that will put a halt to the next suicide bomber or car bomb.”
Military sources agree. “We’ve tried attacks of this kind in the past,” a high-ranking officer confided yesterday. “It’s hard to believe they will have any real effect this time either. Their main effect is to raise morale.”
Meanwhile, Israeli public sentiment is turning increasingly hawkish. According to a poll published yesterday by the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, 65 percent of the Israeli public supports stronger military action against the Palestinians. And a recent poll by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University, a reputable Israeli think tank, revealed that the overwhelming majority of the Jewish public-75 percent-now perceive Yasir Arafat as a terrorist. Sixty percent of the Israeli public also believes that the Oslo agreement will not bring about a peace between Palestinians and Israelis, according to the same poll.
The mood has hardened on the Palestinian side as well. Two weeks ago, Marwan Barghouti, the leader of the Tanzim militias in the West Bank, raised the possibility that peaceful protests might supplant the violent street fighting that has left 400 mostly young Palestinians dead during the past six months. But Barghouti-who is rumored to be high on an Israeli hit list of key Palestinian officials-sounded anything but conciliatory Wednesday night as he stood in Ramallah’s main traffic circle addressing supporters. “The fascist criminal Sharon is incapable of breaking the will of the uprising,” he declared, minutes after the Israeli air strike cut off all power in the city. “The people will not stop the intifada until the occupation ends. We want them to get the hell out of our sight.”
In Ramallah yesterday, the mood was by turns mournful and enraged. Under a blazing sun, a thousand people marched through the streets behind a plain wooden coffin draped in green Hamas flags and containing bits and pieces of the dead Force 17 guard. Hastily drawn-up posters, showing a photograph of the victim framed by twin Kalashnikov rifles, adorned cars, lamp posts and store windows across the city. After reaching the main square, masked fighters burned a mock coffin along with Israeli and American flags. “Hamas will continue its attacks,” one screamed as the flames roared into the sky. The crowd cheered and then continued its march to the cemetery on the edge of Ramallah. There, the Force 17 guard was buried alongside the second victim of the Israeli attack, a housewife whose head was blown off by tank fire as she drove her red Fiat home from a grocery store. As mourners steadily lowered both coffins into their graves, chief gravedigger Hasaf Jaffarey, 55, stood beside a third, still-empty plot and wiped the sweat off his brow. “When there’s a war like this, we dig them ahead of time,” he said, “Then we just wait.” With emotions rising sharply on both sides, the wait almost certainly won’t be long.
