Two More Israeli Troops Killed in Gaza

Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza Strip ambushed and killed two Israeli soldiers Friday, in a week in which Israel had already absorbed its heaviest combat losses in the area during the current 3 1/2-year conflict.

Israel struck back early today by firing missiles into the Gaza City home and office of Mohammed Hindi, the top Gaza leader of Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for two of the deadly attacks against Israeli troops this week. Associates said Hindi escaped unharmed, but about a dozen other Palestinians were hurt in the barrages, which sent booms reverberating across the city.

The burst of violence in the narrow strip of seaside territory, which has left 13 Israeli soldiers and more than 30 Palestinians dead, comes at a time of agonizing and divisive debate over Israel’s presence in Gaza.

On Friday, polls showed a significant strengthening of what was already a solid Israeli majority supporting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s initiative to withdraw troops and settlers from Gaza. A survey published in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper indicated 71% were in favor of a pullout.

But opponents of relinquishing the Gaza settlements continued to insist that a departure would amount to caving in to Palestinian militants. The membership of Sharon’s conservative Likud Party this month voted down the plan by a 3-2 margin.

The latest military fatalities came as Israel was burying three of the five soldiers slain Wednesday during an attack on an armored personnel carrier. The blast that blew apart their vehicle was so powerful that recovering the soldiers’ remains has been an exhausting and dangerous enterprise.

Exposing themselves to Palestinian sniper fire, lines of Israeli soldiers crawled through the sand near the Rafah refugee camp for a second day Friday, hand-sifting the grit in hopes of finding scraps of flesh. Haunting images of the hunt for body parts dominated the front pages of all the major Israeli newspapers.

The two most recent attacks took place in what has become one of the most violent corners of the Palestinian territories: the Israeli-controlled corridor dividing the Gaza Strip from Egypt. Israel announced that in an effort to enhance security, it would widen the strip of no-man’s land along the frontier, and it embarked on a new round of destroying Palestinian structures in Rafah in order to do so.

Hundreds of buildings near the frontier could be knocked down as part of the operation, according to Israeli news reports. The U.N. refugee agency working in the region said that more than 40 families had been left homeless by Friday’s demolitions and that it was giving them shelter.

Israeli leftists denounced the demolitions as inhumane. Lawmaker Yossi Sarid said that “razing half the town of Rafah” would constitute a war crime.

Israeli security officials said, however, that leaving buildings in place would put troops in the area at risk because the structures were being used as cover by the militants from which to fire rockets and antitank missiles.

The week’s heavy military losses -- including the blowing up of another armored vehicle Tuesday, which killed six soldiers -- represented a coup for Palestinian militants, who are usually able to make very little headway against overwhelmingly superior Israeli forces.

Israeli commentators on military affairs, in increasingly sharp tones, have been questioning whether there were serious operational flaws that contributed to the deaths.

The deaths of the two soldiers Friday occurred as Israel was about to usher in the Jewish Sabbath, which runs from sunset Friday to Saturday night. Army officials had to scramble to notify families of the dead before the start of the Sabbath, during which religiously observant Jews do not answer their telephones.

The bloodletting also came on the eve of an expected meeting between Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Korei and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Today’s talks in Jordan will be the highest-level encounter yet between a senior U.S. official and the prime minister. Although Korei was appointed more than six months ago, he still has not met with Sharon.

Palestinians were stung last month when President Bush gave his support to Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza, because the initiative also envisions retaining large Jewish settlements in the West Bank and appears to rule out the return of millions of Palestinian refugees to ancestral homes inside Israel.

After settlers galvanized opponents of the plan and defeated Sharon in the Likud vote, Israel’s peace camp began to fight back. Organizers are hoping to draw tens of thousands of people to a demonstration in Tel Aviv tonight in favor of the pullout.

In recent days, an organization spearheaded by mothers of soldiers serving in Gaza has sprung up, a movement reminiscent of the Four Mothers group that helped bring about the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.

The group, known as Shuvi (Come Home) said in a founding proclamation on its website that “we have no more blood to spare.”

“Every woman knows in her heart that there is not, and will never be, an ideology more precious than the life of my son, and yours,” it said.

Special correspondent Fayed Abu Shammaleh in Gaza City contributed to this report.