- GAZA (Reuters) -- Israeli
air strikes killed five Palestinians in Gaza Thursday as the Palestinian
death toll rose to 100 in a 16-day-old army offensive aimed at crushing
militants behind rocket salvoes into Israel.
-
- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon seeks a decisive
triumph over militants to overcome rightist opposition to his plan to
"disengage"
from conflict with Palestinians by evacuating all Jewish settlers from
Gaza and a few from the West Bank in 2005.
-
- Polls show most Israelis support Sharon's withdrawal
strategy, regarding Gaza as too costly in lives and money, and he plans
to submit his plan to a parliamentary vote on Oct. 25.
-
- Hawks inside and outside Sharon's fraying coalition
reject
any pullback from territories Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war
as "appeasement of Palestinian terrorism."
-
- Settlers and their political patrons planned a series
of protests around Israel later Thursday.
-
- Missiles killed two Hamas gunmen in the sprawling urban
Jabalya refugee camp in north Gaza, stormed by more than 200 tanks and
troop carriers after a Hamas rocket killed two toddlers across the border
in Israel on Sept. 29.
-
- Helicopters backing up an army raid into Rafah refugee
camp in Gaza's south fired three missiles, killing two militants and a
civilian man of 70, medics and residents said. A woman was seriously
wounded.
-
- Military sources said Israeli forces targeted gunmen
who had just launched an anti-tank rocket at troops searching for tunnels
used to smuggle in weapons from Egypt.
-
- Israel's offensive, its biggest in Gaza during the
Palestinian
uprising, has killed at least 59 militants with most of the other 41 dead
believed to be civilians, medics say.
-
- Three Israelis and a Thai farmworker have also
died.
-
- TRAILS OF DESTRUCTION
-
- Officials with the U.N. agency caring for Palestinian
refugees said Israeli armored bulldozers demolished about 30 houses in
Rafah, leaving about 40 people homeless.
-
- The camp is, like Jabalya, a frequent tinderbox in the
four-year-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. Israeli
forces often raze Palestinian buildings they say harbor militants who fire
at them or, in Rafah's case, camouflage smuggling tunnels. Palestinians
and human rights groups denounce the practice as collective
punishment.
-
- Troops hunting elusive Hamas rocket squads in the north
Gaza town of Beit Lahiya carved a trail of destruction Thursday.
-
- About 20 houses were wrecked or seriously damaged and
tanks broke up asphalt roads and water pipes, squashed cars and taxis,
churned up dozens of hectares of olive and strawberry groves, and downed
electricity and telephone lines.
-
- "Rockets were never fired from among our houses
and not from my garlic store," said Anwar al-Shafai, 60, gazing at
the rubble of his business. "It seems to us that Sharon's so-called
unilateral withdrawal will be only an illusion."
-
- "An Israeli bulldozer uprooted the graves of my
mother and uncle. I will have to rebury their remains. Unbelievable,"
said Omar Khalil Omar, a local poet.
-
- Gaza militants have cranked up gun, rocket and mortar
attacks of late, hoping to show that they chased out the Israelis from
occupied lands.
-
- Sharon is determined to batter them into quiescence first
and intends to hold on to swathes of the West Bank with most of the 240,000
settlers as a tradeoff for dumping smaller Gaza.
-
- - Additional reporting by Ori Lewis in Jerusalem
-
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