Fighting Rages at Jenin Camp

JENIN, West Bank —  An explosion in a booby-trapped alleyway deep inside the besieged Jenin refugee camp killed at least 13 Israeli soldiers Tuesday, while uncounted dozens of Palestinians were also reported dead in the fiercest fighting yet in Israel’s 12-day-old West Bank offensive.

And early today, a suicide bomber killed at least 10 Israelis on a bus--the first suicide attack in more than a week.

At the Jenin camp, plumes of smoke rose after the site was bombarded by Israeli combat helicopters. Residents reported seeing bodies littering the streets. Palestinian fighters vowed to resist to the death.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he would press ahead with military raids and incursions across Palestinian territories despite Tuesday’s devastating blow. It was the army’s single greatest combat-related loss in five years. Seven soldiers were wounded in the attack, and another soldier was killed and eight more wounded in a separate attack a short time later.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is due in Israel on Thursday, a day earlier than scheduled, to attempt to defuse the crisis. He said Tuesday that the U.S. would be willing to contribute to an international monitoring force if a cease-fire could be achieved.

Powell also confirmed that he intended to meet with Yasser Arafat despite Israel’s attempts to isolate and ostracize the Palestinian Authority president. Sharon labeled Powell’s decision “a tragic mistake.”

Stoking fears of another war front, Islamic Hezbollah guerrillas continued their attacks on northern Israel, firing missiles and Katyusha rockets Tuesday and early today. Israel responded with overnight air raids, striking suspected guerrilla hide-outs. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Meanwhile, Israel--under mounting international criticism--continued attacking purported militant strongholds and hunting for suspects in the West Bank cities of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Nablus. Israeli forces also raided the West Bank town of Dura. Troops and tanks pulled back, however, from two other cities, Tulkarm and Kalkilya.

Israel says the campaign is aimed at uprooting suicide bombers and other terrorists. Until today, there had been a lull of more than a week in suicide bombing attacks.

At the morning rush hour, a suicide bomber blew himself up on a crowded bus near the coastal Israeli city of Haifa. At least 10 people were killed and 20 wounded in the bus and in nearby cars, police said. The death toll was expected to climb.

The battle for Jenin inside the tight, cramped refugee camp was shaping up as the toughest in the Israeli offensive. Jenin is also the site of a looming humanitarian disaster, according to residents and Palestinian relief workers. They said that Israeli armored bulldozers had flattened dozens of homes, some with people still inside, and that electricity and water had been cut for days.

Hundreds of Palestinians were reported dead or wounded, but an exact count had not been made because ambulances had not been able to retrieve all of the bodies.

It was impossible to independently verify any claims because Israeli authorities have banned journalists from entering Jenin--a decision that fueled rumors of widespread calamity. On Tuesday, reporters were able to reach the entrance to the town, about two miles from the refugee camp, but were turned away by soldiers.

Israeli officials said the battle in Jenin was far from over.

“We will continue to fight as long as necessary despite the loss,” Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Eitan, chief of the Israeli army central command, said in a briefing for reporters in Jerusalem on Tuesday night. “We will continue until we make this camp submit.”

Eitan said the soldiers stumbled into the booby trap as they conducted house-to-house searches.

The men, all reservists, entered an alley in the refugee camp in search of an explosives lab, Israeli officials said. Palestinian fighters then detonated the explosives, bringing the building down on top of the troops.

A second unit of men arrived to attempt to rescue the first but came under heavy gunfire, the Israeli army said. The 13 dead included three whose bodies had to be dug out from the rubble. At least seven other soldiers were hurt, one critically. A suicide bomber apparently joined in the attack, the army said.

“They walked into a trap,” army spokesman Moshe Fogel said.

A total of 23 soldiers have been killed in Jenin in less than a week of fighting. The entire camp, Israeli army officers said, is like a minefield of jury-rigged explosives and bombs meant to stop the advance of invading Israeli forces.

Most Israelis had predicted that the cramped maze of the old city of Nablus would pose the most hazards for army units participating in the West Bank offensive. But the camp in Jenin has offered more resistance. Israeli newspapers were calling it the Palestinian Masada, after the ancient Jewish fortress near the Dead Sea where tradition holds that a band of Jews committed suicide in the 1st century rather than be captured by Roman forces.

Because Jenin, in the northernmost West Bank, is more distant from densely populated parts of Israel than towns such as Tulkarm, it has been a safer hiding place for the most hard-core militants. It is headquarters to radical Islamic Jihad and Hamas factions and has produced the bulk of recent suicide bombers.

Tuesday’s explosion marked the highest Israeli military death toll in a single incident since a clash in September 1997 with Islamic guerrillas of the Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon, where 13 commandos were killed.

Reservist Ron Drori, 30, of Jerusalem, who was injured in Tuesday’s attack, told Israeli television that the soldiers moved into the camp Tuesday morning and did not meet resistance.

“The commander checked if we could enter the three houses and take them over, and decided that it was too dangerous,” Drori said. “We went into a narrow alley. Suddenly, a device exploded between the soldiers. . . . I don’t know where it came from. . . . Immediately, there was another bomb. Almost immediately, they started firing on us from all directions.”

The Israeli government took great pains Tuesday to portray the fighting in Jenin as a clash with armed Palestinians, not a frontal assault on civilians.

“There is no massacre there,” said Sharon’s spokesman, Raanan Gissin. “The 100 dead are armed men who were fighting to the death. Arabs fight to the death.”

Reports from the camp, home to 15,000 refugees living on less than half a square mile, told of civilians fleeing in panic, of heavy shelling and homes in flames. The dead included civilians and fighters, residents said. Contacted by telephone, some residents said they feared that the end was near.

“We are afraid now they will level the entire camp,” said Jamal Shati, a resident active in refugee issues.

Fighters remained defiant.

Jamal abu Hayjeh, a leader of Hamas, appeared on Arabic-language television Tuesday afternoon and praised the “courageous fighters” of the Jenin camp who had proved that they “can defeat the Zionist enemy.”

“We will fight until death or until we win,” he said.

The blast that killed the soldiers occurred about 7 a.m. and could be heard more than a mile away. News of it was not released until the evening, however, so that families could be notified first.

Also by evening, clashes inside Jenin had reportedly resumed. Al Jazeera, a Qatar-based satellite television station, quoted Palestinian fighters in the camp as saying that Israeli armor and snipers were on the attack, trying to corner the militants in a small area of the camp.

To that end, the army was using bulldozers to flatten homes in the camp’s Al Hawashin neighborhood, apparently to make way for a tank assault, Al Jazeera reported.

Earlier, in Burkin, a dusty village about a mile and a half south of the camp where the recent fighting has cut electricity and forced the village school and many businesses to close, Palestinians idled in the streets, listening to transistor radios and exchanging rumors.

The village is home to many camp residents who left before the fighting or were expelled by the Israelis after it began. Telephone contact between the village and the camp has dwindled in recent days.

A 51-year-old metalworker who was arrested in the camp Sunday and expelled Monday offered a fairly up-to-date but limited account of the Israeli siege from the home of his in-laws in Burkin.

The man, neatly dressed and with close-cropped gray hair, is a native and lifelong resident of the camp. He declined to give his name for fear of what might happen to his son and brother, who were still being held by the Israelis.

The metalworker said the assault on the densely packed settlement began about 3 a.m. Thursday and had been marked by daily barrages of machine-gun and rocket fire.

The assault was widely anticipated. The metalworker’s wife, two of his brothers and their families had moved away to the in-laws’ home in Burkin. The metalworker had remained in the camp with a younger brother, their mother and one of his own eight children, a son.

On Sunday morning, he said, about 25 soldiers broke through the wall of the family compound using jackhammers. They went first to the home of the metalworker’s brother, arrested him and interrogated him about a drawing on his living room wall that seemed to resemble a map, he said. The brother was severely beaten, he said.

Then the soldiers broke down the metalworker’s front door and seized him and his son, he said, leaving his mother behind.

His brother was taken from the base in an ambulance to an unspecified location, he said. When the metalworker was freed Monday, “they asked me to go to any village but not back to the refugee camp.”

“I called someone I know in Israel to try to track my brother down, but I cannot find him,” he said. “I am afraid he is dead.”

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Boudreaux reported from Jenin and Wilkinson from Jerusalem.

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