Sharon Calls Gaza Strike a Success; Says More Will Follow
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon today praised an Israeli raid on Monday into the Gaza Strip that left 15 Palestinians dead and dozens wounded, expressing regret for civilian lives lost but brushing aside international criticism as he promised more such attacks.

"It was important, and it was successful," Mr. Sharon said of the mission. "There will be more operations in the Gaza Strip."

Israel has now seized military control of most of the West Bank, and Mr. Sharon has repeatedly suggested recently that he would like to shift his focus to Gaza, the stronghold of the Islamist group Hamas and home to about 1.2 million Palestinian and 7,000 Israeli settlers. Late last month Mr. Sharon said that stepped-up operations there were only a matter of when the army, now stretched thin, could "concentrate the appropriate troops."

Today, after meeting here with Israel's president, Moshe Katsav, Mr. Sharon said, "There is a need to be certain that terrorist organizations will not have the freedom to carry out intentional murder."

The Israeli Army is deeply enmeshed in the West Bank, controlling six of the eight major Palestinian cities and towns and maintaining curfews and strict travel restrictions. Today Palestinian gunmen shot and wounded four people traveling in a car near the West Bank city of Hebron, prompting Israeli forces to comb a nearby village for suspects and to again impose a curfew on Hebron.

In the West Bank city of Jenin, Israeli troops enforcing the curfew wounded four Palestinians, two of them teenagers, hospital officials said.

As the West Bank offensive continues, the army is experimenting with new kinds of assaults in Gaza.

Monday's operation, into the densely populated town of Khan Yunis, marked a new style of mission, senior military officials said, one intended more to press Hamas generally than to hunt down wanted men or weapons factories. Brig. Gen.

Yisrael Ziv, the commander of Israeli forces in the area, said that the mission was supposed to "interfere with their self-confidence."

"Hamas is under a lot of stress lately because of our operations," Brigadier General Ziv said. He acknowledged that none of those killed were wanted by Israel. No soldiers were injured.

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 crudely made rockets from there, both at Israeli settlements inside Gaza and over the fence, including toward Mr. Sharon's farm in southern Israel.

Israel has hunted down and arrested or killed many Hamas militants over the course of the two-year conflict, but it has not yet put the same kind of relentless pressure on the organization itself as it has on the Palestinian Authority.

The last time a Hamas suicide bomber struck, killing six people on a bus in Tel Aviv on Sept.

19, Israel besieged Mr. Arafat in his compound in Ramallah, following a pattern of punishing the Palestinian leader and the Palestinian Authority for attacks by Hamas and other terrorist groups.

The Israeli government declared Mr. Arafat irrelevant last December, but it has continued to maintain that he is accountable for and capable of reigning in violence. Allies of Mr. Arafat accused the Israeli government of a tacit alliance with Hamas to destroy the Palestinian leader, whom Hamas regards as a temporizing if not traitorous compromiser for having negotiated with Israel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/08/international/middleeast/08CND-MIDE.html