Israel Defiantly Warns of More Antiterror Raids in Gaza
Shouldering aside criticism from the Bush administration, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon today warned of more Israeli raids into the Gaza Strip like the one that left 16 Palestinians dead on Monday, calling the strategy a necessary bulwark against terrorist attack.

Mr. Sharon expressed regret for the loss of civilian life, but he sounded a defiant note about the operation, in which Israeli armor guarded by helicopter gunships swept into a densely populated town after midnight, trying to harry and intimidate the Islamist group Hamas.

In Gaza, where the army is now experimenting with ever-deeper raids, skirmishes between Israeli forces and militants or rock-throwers are a daily affair at the margins of settlements or military outposts. Today, Israeli troops killed a 12-year-old girl in Rafah, on Gaza's border with Egypt, Palestinian medical officials said. The army said it was checking into the shooting.

Unlike the West Bank, the Gaza Strip is fenced, and Hamas has not succeeded in sending suicide bombers beyond it, Israeli intelligence agents said. But it has taken to firing crude rockets both at Israeli settlements inside Gaza and over the fence, including toward Mr. Sharon's farm in southern Israel.

The last time a Hamas suicide bomber struck, killing six people on a bus in Tel Aviv on Sept. 19, Israel besieged Yasir Arafat in his compound in Ramallah, following a pattern of punishing Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for attacks by Hamas and other groups.

Israel declared Mr. Arafat irrelevant last December, but it continues to maintain that he is accountable for and capable of reining in violence. His allies have accused the Israeli government of a tacit alliance with Hamas to destroy Mr. Arafat, whom Hamas regards as a temporizing — if not traitorous — compromiser for having negotiated with Israel.

When the army again zeroed in on Mr. Arafat in late September, Mr. Sharon came under sharp domestic criticism. Some said he focused on the wrong target, ignoring the threat from Hamas. Since then, the army has ratcheted up operations in Gaza.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/09/international/middleeast/09MIDE.html