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Gaza campaign to last for `weeks'

A Palestinian man stands in the rubble of a school destroyed in an ongoing Israeli army operation in the Jebaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, on Sunday. PHOTO: AP

Starting the fifth day of Israel's largest offensive in Gaza in four years of conflict, army commanders were talking of a weeks-long operation, while officials looked even further ahead -- to Israel's planned evacuation of settlements from Gaza next year.

Early yesterday, despite the massive operation meant to prevent rocket attacks on Israeli towns, militants in Gaza fired off two rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot. One person was lightly wounded in the attack, Israeli rescue workers said.

The Hamas militant group claimed responsibility for the rocket attack.

In the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya, Israeli troops killed four Palestinian militants as they tried to set off a bomb, the army said. The four were killed in a helicopter missile strike, the army said.

Palestinians identified the four as Hamas militants, one of them a field commander in northern Gaza, Fares Masri, 29, the brother of Hamas spokesman Musher Masri, who came to the hospital to identify the body.

"The forces will have to remain there as long as this danger exists. The troops are ready to continue, not in terms of days, but weeks."

Ariel Sharon, Israeli prime minister

A few hours earlier, Israeli forces targeted a local Hamas commander and another militant in a Gaza City air strike, the army said. The commander was seriously wounded in the attack. A second militant and a bystander were also wounded, hospital officials said.

The large-scale operation in northern Gaza gathered momentum again late Sunday when about 25 tanks moved into Beit Hanoun, the town closest to the Israeli border and the town of Sderot across the fence.

About 15,000 people living in the area of the raid have been without water and electricity for days.

A rocket attack on the town Wednesday killed two tots and set off the operation. Since Thursday, at least 62 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed. Eight Palestinians, including a 13-year-old boy, were killed Sunday.

Israeli forces have cleared a 9km buffer zone in Gaza to move its towns out of range of the rockets, but militants keep trying. An Israeli helicopter fired a missile at militants, killing two, just after they shot off a rocket.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pledged to expand the area under Israeli control to stop the rocket fire.

"The forces will have to remain there as long as this danger exists," Sharon told Army Radio, and Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, the army commander, said, "The troops are ready to continue, not in terms of days, but weeks."

Israeli officials fear that the continuing rocket fire might undermine the already shaky support for Sharon's Gaza pullout plan. Critics warn that after an Israeli exit, the rocket attacks would only escalate.

Many of the critics are from Sharon's own Likud Party, which has voted against the plan twice in different frameworks. Sharon and Likud have for decades been the main forces behind settlement construction and expansion, and Sharon's party members have not taken kindly to his change of heart.

Presenting his plan to evacuate all 21 Gaza settlements and four small ones from the West Bank, Sharon said the presence of 8,000 Jewish settlers among 1.3 million Palestinians had become untenable.
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