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Palestinian Woman, Son, Daughter Killed By Scott Wilson 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. As friends and relatives sought to console him outside the morgue, Hajaj said Israeli artillery shells had been landing a football field away from his home since the previous day. An Israeli military spokesman said no artillery was being fired near the area when the blast occurred but that an airstrike had targeted suspected Palestinian gunmen in the neighborhood at about the same time. After several days in which fighting was centered here in the orchards, houses and sandy streets of Atatara, in Beit Lahiya, hundreds of Palestinian residents combed through the damaged neighborhood. Like the fighting, most of the damage was confined to a swath of dunes, olive and citrus groves and houses roughly a half-mile long and equally wide along this city's western edge. The Israeli military pushed into the area to increase the distance between fields that officials say are used by Palestinian rocket launchers and their targets in southern Israel. "This is terror," said Hussein Zayed, 28, a member of the Palestinian presidential guard, as he looked over his ravaged home behind a wall where palm, lemon and olive trees uprooted by Israeli bulldozers were being gathered into piles. "Not a single shot was fired from this place." Dozens of Israeli troops took up positions in houses here as the operation began, including in Zayed's living room. His second story was strewn with the pieces of a shattered television set, sofa cushions and masonry from the blown-out wall that now offers a view of a ruined greenhouse in the courtyard below. A breeze through the jagged hole slowly pushed a twisted fan dangling from a ceiling pocked with shrapnel marks and bullet holes. The computer Zayed used to pursue an accounting degree at Al-Quds Open University was in pieces, the hens and pigeons he kept in a coop on the first floor gone. The soldiers had left behind only a bag of sandwich rolls. Itidal al-Ajouri had dashed from her family's apartment during intense fighting Friday afternoon, along with her six children. Her husband, Salah, a colonel in the Palestinian National Forces, was at work at the time and said he could hear gunfire crackling behind her when she phoned him for help. The family returned Saturday to a picture of devastation: piles of cassette tapes, splintered cabinet doors, clothes hangers and blankets thrown about the previously neat apartment. Bullet holes in the building behind theirs suggested the apartment had been caught in intense crossfire, probably leaving the family with little choice but to find a new place to live. "We will close this up now and stay somewhere else," said Rasha, who is studying microbiology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. "What else can we do?" © 2006 The
Washington Post Company
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