As of April 20, at least 394 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli police, military, and settler attacks since unrest accelerated in the last three months of last year. The Israeli death toll stands at 71.

Tel Aviv seized on a series of mortar attacks on Israeli targets launched from the Gaza Strip as justification for the brutal raids into the 30-mile-long coastal area inhabited by 1.2 million people, which is ostensibly under control of the Palestinian Authority and off-limits to Israeli military forces.

"We think the use of mortars is disproportionate," said Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres in justifying the raids. "They are not supposed to have mortars according to the Oslo agreement" negotiated between the Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by Yasir Arafat, and the Israeli regime in 1993. Palestinian security forces are officially limited to 7,000 light personal weapons, 120 machine guns, and 45 wheeled armored vehicles.

The April 19 Washington Post noted that "Palestinian mortars have yet to take a life and rarely cause damage to buildings." The Hamas organization has claimed responsibility for many of the attacks. "The means are primitive, but mortars are a symbol, a gesture," said Hamas spokesperson Ismail Abu Shanab.

Describing an April 14 Israeli incursion, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights reported that Tel Aviv's forces "demolished 16 Palestinian-owned houses and their contents, making more than 170 Palestinian civilians homeless.... This escalation came four days after a similar attack on the western area of Kahn Yunis refugee camp. On April 10, Israeli forces demolished 30 houses.... Dozens were wounded with live bullets and artillery shell shrapnel."  
 
April 17 move to reoccupy
An April 17 offensive on a number of targets, including the main office of the Palestine Authority police forces in Gaza City, and two headquarters of the Force 17 security forces associated with Arafat was described by CNN as "Israel's hardest punch at the Palestinians in seven months of violence."

The air, land, and sea assaults "led to the closure of the Egyptian border at the southern end of Gaza and left the area in disarray with homes destroyed, one dead, and 30 wounded," reported the Reuters wire service. A border post was destroyed near Beit Hanun, and the rain of fire was so heavy that the family of a 20-year-old policeman killed at the post was unable to retrieve his body for several hours. "We felt helpless. We could see his broken body but there was nothing we could do," said the man's cousin, Hussam al-Masri. Eventually, stretcher bearers from the Red Crescent medical organization dashed to recover the corpse.

"We lived a night of fire, war, and horror," said one 30-year-old resident of the northern town of Beit Hanoun. In Gaza City, "the shelling continued for more than three hours and it was all after midnight," said Saud Abu Ramadan, a journalist.

The Israeli military divided Gaza into three areas, prohibiting movement among them. Hundreds of people were forced to travel along beaches in donkey carts to points where they could pick up taxis and buses. One Israeli bulldozer dug a trench in the coastal road and piled it with rocks to bar traffic. "That's too much, that's too much," said one elderly woman, forced to take a detour along the sand.

The commander of the offensive, Brig. Gen. Yair Naveh, said that "he aimed to push back the line from which mortars are fired into Israel," according to the New York Times. The so-called "security belt" seized by the Israeli forces comprised two strips of territory, each more than a mile deep.

As troops flattened farmhouses, demolished police barracks, and felled acres of orchards to make way for an infantry battalion and other reinforcements, Naveh spoke of digging in for "days, weeks, even months." Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank took to the streets to express their opposition.

The preparations for a reoccupation of the PA-controlled territory--described as "indefinite" by one army spokesperson--prompted sharp criticism from the U.S. government. Secretary of State Colin Powell described the Israeli action as "excessive and disproportionate." State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher said that the Israeli forces should pull back immediately from the Gaza territory. That same evening, tanks and other military vehicles began moving back into Israel. The withdrawal was completed before dawn on April 18.  
 
Tel Aviv plans 'pinpoint' operations
The next day the government of Ariel Sharon approved a proposal from Defense Minister Ben-Eliezer to conduct what he claimed would be "'smart and quiet pinpoint' operations inside Palestinian controlled...territories," according to the Ha'aretz newspaper. Further incursions were reported on April 21 and 22.

Justifying Israel's brutal and continuing crackdown, Sharon said several days earlier that "the end of the conflict will come only when the Arab world recognizes the innate right of the Jewish people to establish an independent Jewish state in the Middle East. And that recognition has not yet come."

Four Israeli jets fired six rockets at a radar site belonging to the government of Syria in the central mountains of Lebanon on April 16, destroying the installation and leaving three Syrian soldiers dead and a number wounded. Tel Aviv said it had acted in retaliation for attacks on the Israeli-Lebanon border by the Lebanese group Hezbollah. Two days earlier an Israeli soldier had been killed by an anti-tank missile.

This was the first Israeli attack on Syrian positions in Lebanon since 1996. Damascus maintains some 35,000 troops in Lebanon.  
 
 
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