Israelis Withdraw From North Gaza

Palestinian Woman, Son, Daughter Killed

BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip, July 8 -- Israeli tanks and bulldozers withdrew from northern Gaza before dawn Saturday after two days of heavy fighting, leaving behind a strip of churned fields, wrecked roads and a few heavily damaged homes.

Along Gaza's eastern border, where more Israeli armor entered the strip very early Saturday, the military stepped up its activity. On Saturday night, an explosion killed a woman and two of her children on the eastern edge of Gaza City.

The cause of the explosion, which left four other children of the Hajaj family wounded, remained unclear. Palestinian witnesses said an Israeli artillery shell struck the family's house, but an Israeli spokesman said the military was investigating whether the house had been hit in an airstrike.

"Without warning, without reason, the shell came into my first floor," Fareed Hajaj, the husband and father of the dead, said outside the morgue at al-Shifa Hospital as he prepared to identify the bodies of his wife and two children inside.

The Israelis' abrupt pullback from the northern end of the Gaza Strip sharply reduced the overall intensity of their military operations in Gaza, which have been aimed at recovering a captured soldier, reducing the Palestinians' steady rocket fire into southern Israel and weakening the radical Hamas movement's hold on the Palestinian government. More than 40 Palestinians, most of them gunmen, and one Israeli soldier have been killed in 11 days of fighting.

Although military officials warned that operations had not ended, Israel's departure from its deepest position inside Gaza may signal the government's desire to pursue talks to win the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19, who was taken by Palestinian gunmen in a June 25 raid on an army post just outside Gaza. But it was unclear how the deaths of the Hajaj family members, which drew a crowd to the morgue, would influence developments.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, whose armed wing is one of the groups holding Shalit, issued a statement Saturday calling on both sides to cease military action and to revive talks with Egyptian mediators attempting to broker Shalit's release. The groups holding Shalit have demanded that Israel release some Palestinian prisoners in exchange for his release.

"To get out of the current crisis, it is necessary that all parties restore calm on the basis of mutually stopping all military operations," the statement said.

Israeli officials reiterated the government's unwavering rejection of a prisoner swap. In addition, officials in the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he did not support the suggestion by his public security minister, Avi Dichter, on Friday that an end to the rocket attacks and Shalit's safe release would prompt Israel to free some Palestinian prisoners in the future.

"There will be no cease-fire until the Palestinians return Israel's soldier safe and the firing of rockets is ceased," an Israeli official said Saturday. [Early Sunday, Israeli police reported that a rocket landed on a home in Sderot, badly damaging the house and injuring at least one person.]

Early Saturday, Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered Gaza near the Karni crossing, the main passage for cargo into the strip, in search of cross-border tunnels like the one used by Palestinian gunmen to attack Shalit's post farther south. Hospital officials said two Palestinian gunmen and a local journalist were killed in fighting.

The blast that killed Amna Hajaj, 45, her son Mohammed, 23, and her 6-year-old daughter, Rawan, occurred just after nightfall. Fareed Hajaj said he was standing in the street outside his house in the east Gaza City neighborhood of Shajaiyeh when a blast destroyed much of it.