5 Israeli Raids in Gaza Kill 10, Injure Scores

JERUSALEM —  Helicopters and warplanes hammered the Gaza Strip on Monday, staging five raids that killed at least 10 Palestinians and injured nearly 100 others in one of Israel’s most intense waves of airstrikes since fighting began three years ago.

Most of the casualties were believed to be civilian bystanders rather than the Palestinian militants Israel said it was targeting. The injured included several elementary school children who were leaving class just as one of the missiles hit a busy street in downtown Gaza City.

The attacks came a day after the Israeli army’s worst one-day loss in months, the ambush deaths of three soldiers patrolling a West Bank village outside Ramallah.

On Monday, a controversy erupted over whether a small, lightly armed squad should have been out after dark in a hostile area.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, speaking to lawmakers at the start of the legislative session, blamed Yasser Arafat for the latest upsurge in violence and the breakdown of the American-backed peace plan. Branding the Palestinian leader the “greatest obstacle to peace,” he renewed calls, which his government had muted in recent weeks, to deprive Arafat -- at the very least -- of his position of authority.

“The withdrawal from the peace plan has a clear address. Arafat is the man who foiled and continues to foil any progress,” Sharon said. Israel is committed “to his removal from the political arena.”

The day’s five strikes over a 14-hour period marked the fiery end of a brief hiatus in Israel’s campaign of “targeted killings” of leaders and senior field operatives of the Hamas militant group.

Though single Israeli airstrikes have at times caused more casualties, this marked the first time in the 37-month intifada that so many back-to-back airborne raids had been launched at targets associated with Palestinian militants.

Israel described the actions as part of an ongoing effort to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorist groups, but the immediate impetus for such wide-ranging strikes against Hamas was unclear. It was not Hamas but another Palestinian militant group -- the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, affiliated with Arafat’s Fatah faction -- that claimed responsibility for ambushing the Israeli patrol.

The deadliest of the Gaza strikes was a chaotic nighttime attack with helicopter-fired missiles in the crowded Nusseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Dozens of people were hurt.

According to witnesses, the first missile struck a car carrying several Palestinian militants. As a crowd of people rushed forward to try to help the men, another missile hit, sending bloodied body parts and razor-sharp shrapnel flying in all directions.

Doctors at nearby Palestinian hospitals said they were overwhelmed by the casualties that poured into their ill-equipped emergency rooms.

Among those injured in an earlier raid, at midday, were several elementary school children who had just left class and were crossing a busy street when the Israeli helicopters swooped in to fire on a truck that had stopped at a traffic light.

The two men inside the truck, suspected Hamas members, were killed, along with a civilian in a nearby car. Even before the day’s final raids had taken place, Hamas was vowing to exact revenge.

In a statement, Hamas declared the United States to be complicit in the Israeli strikes -- an ominous accusation in light of a roadside bombing in Gaza last week that killed three American security workers traveling in an official U.S. convoy.

“Our retaliation won’t be as trifling as the Zionists are used to seeing,” Hamas’ military wing said in a statement circulated in Gaza.

Islamic Jihad, the second-largest of the Palestinian militant groups, which carried out a suicide bombing Oct. 4 in the Israeli port city of Haifa that killed 21 people, also vented its anger at Americans as well as Israel.

It initially appeared that the first of the day’s Israeli strikes, an early-morning F-16 raid on a house the Israeli military said was an arms dump, had targeted a top Islamic Jihad leader, Abdullah Shami, who lived about 100 yards away.

But the Israeli army later denied that Shami had been the target, and Palestinians said he was not in the area at the time. Nonetheless, Islamic Jihad responded with fury.

“We hold the American administration and the Sharon government responsible for this terror and aggression,” said Khalid Batish, an Islamic Jihad leader who rushed to the scene of the airstrike, a two-story structure set in a small orange grove in an eastern neighborhood of Gaza City.

Less than three hours later, Israeli helicopters took aim at the pickup truck carrying the two suspected Hamas militants in Gaza City.

Israeli officials said the pair had been seen salvaging weapons from the wreckage of the house that was hit earlier.

Witnesses said the that truck was incinerated just as the children emerged from the nearby school and that several of the youngsters were hit by pieces of flaming debris.

“We didn’t hear any helicopter approaching, just the blast when the missiles hit,” said a 21-year-old university student who would give only his first name, Walid.

“There was smoke and fire, and so many of us in the street, and lots of cars.”

Hospital officials said at least three children were among the 13 people injured in that strike and that another dozen people were hurt in the early-morning raid on the suspected weapons cache in eastern Gaza City. That structure was hit again later by F-16s.

Palestinians expressed outrage that Israel would carry out air raids in a crowded urban center, saying it was impossible to avoid maiming and killing innocent people.

A shaken middle-aged Palestinian man, who leaped from his damaged car and sought cover in the midday strike downtown, said he did not feel safe anywhere in the city. “All I could do was try to hide myself,” he said, still trembling.

In the last of its daylight raids, Israeli missiles destroyed a small structure on the agricultural eastern outskirts of Gaza City, witnesses said.

The Israeli army said it was used by Palestinian militant groups to store and make homemade rockets.

The airstrikes were described by the army as part of the ongoing “activity against the terror infrastructure,” and Sharon signaled that there would be no letup in the offensive.

“The Palestinians have not taken even one step to stop the terror against us,” the prime minister said in his speech to lawmakers.

Sharon also took sharp jabs at political rival Shimon Peres for his role in crafting an unofficial peace blueprint, unveiled last month by leading Israeli left-wing figures and Palestinian officials as an alternative to the faltering “road map” peace plan. Sharon said the road map was the only way forward; Peres, addressing parliament immediately after him, called it a “road accident.”

As Israel began burying its latest dead -- the three soldiers killed Sunday night -- criticism erupted over why the troops had been sent to patrol in an area where they were so vulnerable.

On Monday, their grieving parents aimed blistering and highly unusual public criticism at Israel’s military establishment, saying such a small, lightly equipped group should never have been sent out on foot patrol after dark in a hostile Palestinian village.

The father of one of the three, who ranged in age from 19 to 21, likened the young soldiers’ orders to a death sentence.

Israeli news reports cited a harrowing account of the attack by the lone surviving soldier, the fourth member of the patrol. He was wounded in an initial volley of shots, and fell into some undergrowth that apparently concealed him. From his hospital bed, he described hearing the assailants approach and “verify” his comrades’ deaths by firing shots into their heads at close range. The attackers stole the dead soldiers’ weapons and escaped.

The Maariv newspaper, in a departure from its usual practice, carried a front-page picture of body bags containing the soldiers’ remains, with a headline asking why they had died.

“In my opinion, the commander who sends out soldiers this way executes them -- he simply executes them,” Avraham Solomon, the father of 21-year-old Sgt. Roi Yaakov Solomon, told reporters.

“They are children, children. And they obey orders, and their commanders execute them, just like that, without thinking,” he said.

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Times special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Gaza City contributed to this report.