2 Soldiers Killed, One Kidnapped in Raid at Gaza Border
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 26, 2006
JERUSALEM, June 25 -- A squad of Palestinian gunmen sneaked through a tunnel beneath Israel's border with the Gaza Strip on Sunday and attacked an army post with grenades, rifles and antitank missiles, killing two Israeli soldiers and kidnapping another.
Two Palestinian gunmen were killed in the pre-dawn raid, the most ambitious against an Israeli military target since Israel evacuated Gaza last fall. At least four Israeli soldiers were wounded in the clash, which brought Israeli tanks and bulldozers about a half-mile inside the Gaza border to scour the desert terrain and the half-mile long tunnel beneath for the missing soldier.
Until the Sunday incursion, only small Israeli commando forces had entered Gaza on two operations since the evacuation. Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, chief of the Israeli military, said during a news conference hours after the raid that information suggested the soldier remains alive.
"There is no doubt that this caught us by surprise, in certain aspects," Halutz said. "I don't want to voice conclusive remarks on the future, as I believe we should first investigate things to the end. We must, of course, accept the instructions from the political echelon and then decide what to do."
Several Palestinian groups asserted responsibility for the operation, whose sophistication resembled ones staged by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah along Israel's northern border. In the past, those raids have resulted in the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, who are often used as leverage to gain the release of Palestinians being held in Israeli jails.
Israeli military officials identified the kidnapped soldier as Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19, from the Galilee region of northern Israel, who began his military service less than a year ago.
The last known kidnapping of a soldier by a Palestinian armed group was in 1994. The Israeli government said Cpl. Nachson Waxman, 19, was taken by the Islamic group Hamas and died during a rescue operation.
Military officials said Sunday's raid involved eight gunmen dressed in Israeli army uniforms who divided into three assault groups once they infiltrated near the Kerem Shalom crossing, where the borders of Israel, Egypt and Gaza meet.
Among the attackers were members of the Izzadeen al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, whose leaders control the Palestinian government. In his remarks, Halutz said, "Hamas is involved in this matter from head to foot."
The Popular Resistance Committees and a previously unknown group calling itself the Army of Islam also participated in the attack.
Spokesmen for the groups in Gaza said the raid was a response to the Israeli airstrike on a militia training camp in southern Gaza earlier this month that killed Jamal Abu Samhadanah, the leader of the Popular Resistance Committees who last month was named director general of the Hamas-run Interior Ministry.
Later in the day, the groups disclosed that the soldier, Shalit, had been wounded in the stomach and chest but that he was strong enough to have been led without assistance.
For the past week, Israeli military officials have warned of an impending attack at the southern crossings, prompting several relatively short closures of the Kerem Shalom and Rafah passages. The crossings, important to Gaza's economy and its chief gateway to Egypt, were closed after the attack.
No Palestinian gunmen have breached the Gaza border since the last Israeli soldier left the strip last September, according to senior officers in the army's Gaza division. But Palestinian fighters have sought to tunnel under the border, sneak into Israel by sea and regularly fire crude rockets toward Israeli farming communities on the strip's periphery.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is facing stiffening pressure to end the missile barrage against southern Israel, which in the past two weeks has exceeded 120 rockets. Most have landed harmlessly in empty areas, but more than a dozen have hit the city of Sderot, wounding one resident gravely.
At the same time, Israeli artillery and airstrikes aimed at putting down the rocket fire have taken a heavy toll on Palestinian civilians. Fourteen civilians, including at least five children, have been killed by the Israeli military strikes in the past two weeks.
Halutz called an emergency meeting following the attack to devise a response, which some Israeli officials said should include a sustained ground offensive inside Gaza. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a former defense minister who now holds the infrastructure portfolio in Olmert's cabinet, told Israel's Army Radio that "we can no longer sit quietly."
"They've decided to sacrifice their people, their livelihood and their sick and everything that they have for the sake of an all-out war against Israel," he said.
The Palestinian raid came as Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas were trying to reach an agreement on a unified political program for the territories, especially concerning the government's approach to Israel. Abbas has been under pressure from Israel to disarm radical Palestinian groups, including Hamas.
Abbas, who favors negotiations rather than armed conflict with Israel, contacted the radical Palestinian groups Sunday in an effort to win the soldier's release. In condemning the attack, Abbas warned that the Israeli military would likely enter the strip if the soldier was not freed unharmed. Some Hamas political leaders joined him in calling for the release, while spokesmen for the kidnappers said they would soon issue a list of demands.
Abbas has challenged Hamas, which defeated his Fatah movement in January parliamentary elections, to endorse the creation of a future Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem -- territory Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. Hamas favors the creation of an Islamic state across territory that now includes Israel and has rejected calls from Abbas and international donors to recognize the Jewish state's right to exist.
The talks, which could head off a planned July 26 referendum on the shape of a future Palestinian state, have reportedly been progressing. Among other items on the agenda is one that calls for limiting armed attacks against Israeli targets to the occupied territories, something Haniyeh and Abbas apparently agreed to adopt before Sunday's pre-dawn attack inside Israel.
After emerging from the tunnel -- which Israeli military officials said began inside a house about a quarter-mile inside the Gaza Strip -- Palestinian gunmen first fired an antitank missile at an empty armored-personnel carrier. A second group tossed hand grenades inside an Israeli tank, killing two soldiers and wounding at least four others. The kidnapped soldier was taken from the site, military officials said.
The third group fired on a military guard post at the entrance to the Kerem Shalom kibbutz, a collective agricultural community with a population of a few dozen people.
"This was a very well-planned attack and had clearly been in the works for some time," said Capt. Noa Meir, an Israeli military spokeswoman.
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