More Deadly Fighting as Israelis Search for Bodies

JERUSALEM —  Palestinian militants blew up the second explosives-laden Israeli armored vehicle in as many days, killing five soldiers Wednesday, even as the army scoured a run-down district of Gaza City for the remains of six comrades who had died in the first blast.

The 11 dead was the highest two-day toll for the Israeli army in Gaza in more than 3 1/2 years of the current conflict. On the Palestinian side, doctors said 23 people had died and more than 140 were hurt during 72 hours of chaotic fighting that ended with an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza City early today.

In Israel, where Wednesday had been a day of national mourning even before word of the latest soldier deaths emerged, the debate over the presence of Jewish settlers in Gaza, and the young troops who must protect them, grew more bitter and divisive.

With Israel saying it had recovered the remains of the six soldiers who died in the first explosion, a round of tearful funerals was set to begin today.

The armored personnel carrier that was attacked Wednesday afternoon near the southern town of Rafah was carrying a large load of explosives intended for use in destroying weapons-smuggling tunnels that run beneath the Egyptian frontier, the army said.

The Israeli vehicle either struck a buried bomb or was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, or both, setting off an enormous explosion that instantly killed all five soldiers inside and flung metal and body parts hundreds of yards, army spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal said.

Wednesday began with Israeli soldiers, backed by combat helicopters, armored vehicles and fire from navy gunboats, clambering onto tin rooftops and tramping through cramped courtyards in the Zeitoun neighborhood on Gaza City’s southern fringes. They were looking for human remains scattered when a powerful explosion destroyed the first troop carrier Tuesday. Some body parts had been snatched up by Palestinian fighters as war trophies or bargaining chips.

The Israelis’ daylong search ignited a fierce new round of street battles between troops and Palestinian gunmen in Zeitoun, leaving at least seven Palestinians dead and dozens of others wounded, according to Palestinian hospital officials, who said the casualties included civilians as well as combatants.

At least seven more Palestinians were reportedly killed overnight in an Israeli missile strike in Rafah.

Terrified Palestinians huddled inside slum apartment buildings and cinderblock homes as large explosions and the rattle of machine-gun fire echoed outside, continuing for hours after nightfall. The two-day Israeli operation represented Gaza’s heaviest and most sustained outbreak of urban warfare in the current conflict.

“We cannot move at all,” Mustafa Ashour, a 38-year-old father of seven, said by telephone from his home in Zeitoun, where he had herded his family into the room furthest from the street and tried to protect it with mattresses. “The children are scared -- my littlest one won’t stop crying. Bullets are flying everywhere, and all our windows are broken.”

Islamic Jihad, which had claimed responsibility along with Hamas for Tuesday’s attack, said it was responsible for the Rafah-area attack as well.

“Our explosives unit destroyed the Zionist armor in a direct hit,” said a statement distributed by the Al Quds Brigade, Islamic Jihad’s military wing. “We will continue the way of jihad and martyrdom until expelling the last Zionist from our Islamic land.”

Israel does not confirm soldiers’ deaths until their families have been notified and exercises military censorship over news accounts. But via Hebrew-language websites and flurries of cellphone calls, word of the fatalities leaked out almost immediately.

Frantic relatives sent text messages to their soldier sons, husbands and brothers serving in Gaza, demanding to know if they were safe.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his top security advisors, who a day earlier had decided against retaliation of what would be considered a strategic magnitude, once again weighed Israel’s response.

Some political figures, including Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, renewed their calls to strike at Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who has long been blamed by Israel for fomenting violence.

“I do not believe he should remain in the arena,” Shalom said. “So long as he remains with us, he continues to inspire the terror organizations with encouragement and support, and we cannot allow this to continue.”

Sharon’s options for retaliation are limited, and some would carry considerable complications. Israel already has assassinated nearly all the top Hamas leaders in Gaza, but some officials have suggested that under certain circumstances the group’s Damascus-based leaders might be targeted. But such a strike would probably inflame regional tensions.

Both opponents and supporters of the prime minister’s initiative to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip, which has stalled since being resoundingly voted down May 2 by voters from Sharon’s conservative Likud Party, claimed that the spiraling violence supported their position.

Hard-liners say Israel must stand fast against Palestinian militant groups that have made the seaside territory a prime launching pad for attacks, but other observers said the latest fighting only shows what a quagmire Gaza has become.

Polls repeatedly have suggested that most Israelis support a withdrawal. Ami Ayalon, the former head of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service, wrote in a commentary in the Maariv daily that Israel was “deeply mired in the mud of conflict” in Gaza.

An editorial cartoon in the Haaretz newspaper showed several scowling Jewish settlers shaking their heads over Sharon’s plan to pull out of Gaza, while just behind them, the black smoke of battle filled the horizon.

By day’s end, Israeli officials said that searchers believed they had managed to gather at least some of the remains of each of the six soldiers -- enough, eminent rabbis agreed, for burial. Later reports also said Palestinians had turned over more body parts to Egyptian mediators, who in turn handed them over to Israel, but Israel denied having made any deal with militants.

The issue of the soldiers’ remains is an emotionally charged one in Israel, which traditionally spares no effort to bring home its war dead. This year, Israel traded hundreds of Arab prisoners for the remains of two soldiers together with an Israeli businessman who had been kidnapped by the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah.

Despite that long-held custom of going to extraordinary lengths to retrieve remains, commentators questioned whether it was worth risking more troops’ lives to search a crowded Palestinian neighborhood for body parts.

The relatives of one of the dead soldiers, in a wrenching interview aired on Israel’s Channel One television, urged that the search be called off, even though as religious Jews they believe that a body should be buried intact if at all possible.

“We keep on saying that we do not want to endanger any more soldiers,” Sarah Neuman, the mother of 21-year-old Cpl. Eitan Neuman, told the TV interviewer. “We view the body as a ... container for the soul inside it, and sometimes containers break. We are certainly not asking them to continue searches down to the last fingernail.”

Combat fatalities in such large numbers always inspire intense scrutiny. Military commentators questioned why six soldiers, rather than the recommended three, would have been assigned to a vehicle carrying a large load of high explosives.

The casualty count brought a rush of comparisons to the bloodying that Israeli forces took in southern Lebanon during the final months of their occupation. Public pressure, galvanized by a group of soldiers’ mothers, helped bring about the Israeli withdrawal in May 2000.

“In the consciousness of a large part of the public, Gaza has become Lebanon,” the country’s premier political columnist, Nahum Barnea, wrote in Wednesday’s editions of the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. “The formation of a protest movement of that type ... is only a matter of time.”

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