Israeli Military Advances Into More of the West Bank
Amos Yaron, the director general of Israel's Defense Ministry, said the military was preparing a "decisive and crushing" response to Palestinian attacks that have killed 33 Israelis in the past week.

"We have to take much more massive action than we have up until now," he told Israel Radio. But he also suggested that the army had not fully embraced a strategy of reconquering land. "If this entails entering the territories and staying there a long time, then we will have to consider it," he said.

In fact, the precise contours of the new policy remain uncertain, though the army said it was now holding positions in at least five of eight major Palestinian cities and towns in the West Bank, from Jenin in the north to Bethlehem in the south.

A lasting Israeli grip on swaths of such territory would present Israel with severe budgetary, military and administrative headaches, Israeli analysts warned. For example, the government may have to take back responsibility for providing an array of services to Palestinians, from electricity to education.

At the same time, the army would almost certainly be forced to make another broad call-up of its reserve forces, at a time when the government is seeking savings to offset a deep hole in the budget, caused partly by the last major West Bank offensive.

…that six-week offensive ended in late April, with predictions by the Israeli Army and government that Israelis would not experience another wave of terrorism for several months.…

The army said it had captured or killed 150 of the top militants, including bomb makers and operations masterminds.

Israeli forces never stopped raiding Palestinian-controlled territory in the West Bank. They tightened blockades of the big cities and towns, while imposing new restrictions on Palestinians seeking to travel through the West Bank.

Despite these Israeli moves, each of the major militant groups quickly returned to conducting suicidal bombings or shooting attacks.

Public approval of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which plummeted right before the last offensive and soared during it, has started to slip.

In a poll published Friday by the newspaper Maariv, only 38 percent of Israelis said they thought that Mr. Sharon had "a solution for the problem of terrorism." Fifty-four percent said that he did not.

The poll showed that a majority of Israelis — 52 percent — favored building a security fence to separate themselves from the Palestinians, while evacuating all settlements in the Gaza Strip and some in the West Bank. A third of respondents favored separation without any evacuation of settlements.

A plurality of Israelis — 47 percent versus 34 percent — said Israel should hasten diplomatic contacts with Mr. Arafat's Palestinian Authority rather than declare war on it. By a narrower margin — 49 percent to 43 percent — those polled supported establishing a Palestinian state. The poll had a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.

Today, Israeli forces moved again into the town of Dura, near Hebron, in what the army called a renewed search for militants there. The army said it was continuing to investigate the killings in Jenin on Friday of four Palestinians, including three children. Tanks fired on a crowd of Palestinians who had gone to shop in the market, wrongly believing that an Israeli-imposed curfew had been lifted. The army said its initial investigation pointed to a mistake by Israeli forces on the scene, who it said fired warning shots to deter an approaching crowd.

The Israeli press reported this week that Mr. Sharon's government was researching the legality of expelling the families of suicide bombers from the West Bank, in a bid to create a disincentive for attackers who embrace their own deaths.

There were signs of growing debate within Palestinian society over the efficacy, if not explicitly the morality, of such attacks. On Wednesday, a group of 55 Palestinian intellectuals published a full-page advertisement in the Arabic-language newspaper Al Quds, calling for a halt to attacks on Israeli civilians.

The advertisement has run each day since, with more signatures each time. More than 500 Palestinians have now signed the petition, which reads, "We urge those behind military attacks against civilians inside Israel to reconsider their positions and to stop pushing our youth to carry out these attacks, which only result in deepening hatred between the two peoples."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/23/international/middleeast/23MIDE.html