Fears for Gaza homes as Israelis seal off town

The Israeli army sealed off the increasingly tense southern Gaza town of Rafah yesterday in what fearful residents assumed was the first stage of a large-scale military operation that might include the demolition of several hundred homes.

The Israeli army sealed off the increasingly tense southern Gaza town of Rafah yesterday in what fearful residents assumed was the first stage of a large-scale military operation that might include the demolition of several hundred homes.

Tanks were deployed at points on the main road between Rafah, on the Egyptian border, and Khan Younis to its north, amid growing speculation that the army was on the point of razing the homes for a major widening of the Israeli patrol route along the Egyptian border.

Five soldiers were killed last Wednesday at the border when their armoured troop carrier was blown up by militants.

As scores of residents loaded their belongings on to donkey carts and trucks in preparation for flight from the camp, Israeli commanders were also said by security officials to be considering digging a deep trench or moat along the border to improve security and stop the construction of cross-border tunnels used to bring weapons in from Egypt.

The moves were ominously consistent with the threat issued at the weekend by Moshe Ya'alon, the army chief of staff, to destroy hundreds of homes. His remarks followed the lifting of an interim ban on further demolitions by the High Court. More than a thousand Rafah residents had been left homeless at the end of last week.

As the Palestinian leadership launched a frantic diplomatic initiative to secure international pressure on Israel not to go ahead with the demolitions, Condeleezza Rice, the United States National Security Adviser, said in Berlin that the US administration had told Israel "that some of their actions don't create the best atmosphere".

She added after meeting the Palestinian Prime Minister, Ahmed Qureia, that the issue was a "subject of conversation and it's a subject of concern".

The Palestinian Foreign Minister, Nabil Shaath, told Ms Rice that he had received calls from his own anxious relatives in the town, widely regarded as having been worse afflicted than any other since the beginning of the present Palestinian uprising more than three-and-a-half years ago.

Mr Shaath added: "She said that she and President Bush will act to stop what is going on in Rafah."

Earlier in the day and before the sudden closure imposed on Rafah, residents of a street in the refugee camp's Block O heatedly debated whether to leave as they stood in front of the wreckage of one of several two-storey buildings destroyed in a street about 150 metres from the patrol road and a heavily fortified Israeli post. A mangled, burnt-out car was embedded in rubble several feet high.

Manur Qishta, 60, whose house had contained three families, said that armoured Israeli forces had entered the camp on Wednesday. "We ran away and stayed with relatives. When we came back on Saturday we had no house."

But other residents were less laconic in their descriptions of the missile-and-tank assault mounted on Block O by Israeli forces shortly after the troop carrier was blown up on Wednesday. Twelve Palestinians including civilians as well as militants were killed in Rafah in the subsequent 48 hours.

At the al-Khansa UN school, serving as a makeshift refuge for 400 people displaced by the demolitions, one woman injured in the foot, Fatieh abu Tour, said yesterday that the army had fired rockets at her three-storey house, home to an extended family of 20.

Another woman, Aysha Faramawi, 28, said she was washing her children's clothes when she saw tanks advancing in the street. "I heard a loud explosion. I was screaming, trying to find my children. We rushed out.

"I didn't know where to go. The helicopters were shooting. We went along the wall to a mosque but then that was bombarded and we left," she said.

"I took three children in each hand. I couldn't go forward and I couldn't go back. I felt they were shooting around me. There were Hummer jeeps, Apaches, tanks, everything."

Yesterday, Ms Rice coupled criticism of the demolitions with a warning that the US does not believe, as she was said to have put it, that the Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat is conducive to the peace process and that the PA had to do more to combat terrorism.

Meanwhile, Yuval Dvir, an Israeli reserve colonel who oversaw the creation of the buffer zone on the Egypt-Gaza border in the 1980s, told Israel Radio that Israel should leave Gaza now, and that the plan to widen the road was "foolish" and would not enhance Israeli security: "We are following our guts and not our brains."

Soldiers also dismantled an unauthorised West Bank settlement yesterday. Jewish settlers set nearby fields on fire and blocked roads with piles of sand. Only a few settlers live at the Mitzpeh Yitzhar outpost south of the Palestinian city of Nablus, but reinforcements came from other settlements.

Police detained 20 settlers on the hilltop, said a spokesman, Doron Ben-Amo.