TULKARIM, West Bank, March 1 (UPI) -- Crack Israeli infantrymen backed by tanks, engineering and intelligence units Friday expanded their hold over two West Bank refugee camps considered hotbeds of Palestinian militancy.
It was the first time since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000 that Israelis moved to capture a refugee camp.
The raids on the Balata camp in southeast Nablus and Nur e-Shams in southern Jenin are "designed to make it clear that no place is, nor will be, safe for terrorist elements and those who send them to murder Israeli civilians and soldiers," said Brig. Gen. Gershon Yitzhak, commander of the Israeli forces in the West Bank.
However, senior officers, including Yitzhak, seemed to lower expectations of achievements at Balata and Nur e-Shams. Independent sources criticized the idea of engaging in such risky operations.
The Palestinian refugee camps have always been considered daunting sites, even when the Israelis controlled the entire West Bank and the Palestinians had fewer arms. Israeli sources said the Palestinian Authority also has difficulties asserting its rule there.
"There is no authority in the refugee camps," Brig. Gen. Ron Kitrey, the army’s spokesman, told United Press International. "No police, no intelligence, (just) a concentration of bad guys."
Balata, for example, is packed with rectangular flat-topped gray houses, sometimes so close that walls touch one another and alleys are as narrow as apartment corridors.
According to Palestinian records, some 20,000 people live in Balata and close to 14,000 in Jenin.
Until this week, Israeli troops avoided entering the refugee camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Yitzhak noted in a briefing at a Border Police camp outside Tulkarim.
"An unprecedented volume of activity that was generated and emerged from the camps against Israeli citizens and soldiers, and especially the Palestinian security forces’ helplessness, left us with no alternative but to go in to those places," he said.
Early this week, Israeli officials warned Palestinian military and intelligence officers that unless the Palestinians clamp down on troublesome areas, the Israeli forces would go there.
Palestinian attacks continued, and late Wednesday night Israeli troops surrounded the camps.
Helicopter gunships fired missiles at two targets that blocked routes into Balata and fired at armed gunmen, the commander of the operation there, Col. Aviv Kohavi, told UPI on Thursday atop Mount Gerizim, overlooking Balata.
Paratroopers, backed by tank machine gunfire, entered the camp, tried to avoid or detonate from afar the dozens of explosive charges and mines Palestinians planted, but one soldier was killed and two were injured.
Later, to avoid exposure to snipers, the soldiers used discs to cut through walls and move from house to house without venturing into the open.
At 3 a.m. Friday, Golani infantrymen began pushing into the camp in Jenin.
The troops were working "very slowly though in constant movement," the Israel Defense Forces' spokesman, Kitrey, told UPI.
Gershon estimated that at least 20 armed Palestinians "who resisted our forces’ activity were killed in the first 48 hours and many more were injured."
Several people on the Israel Security Agency’s wanted list were detained, he added.
Kitrey said he doubted that many wanted people would be found.
"They fled and those who stayed, stayed to fight," he told UPI.
Division commander Yitzhak, who was asked whether they found plants where rockets and mortars were produced, answered: "Not yet."
He said the troops have not begun searching sites on the basis of intelligence data and expected that stage to begin Friday afternoon.
"I assume we are not going to find many of the things, but the mere operation, reaching these places, is valuable," he said.
Independent sources, some with vast military experience, criticized the operation as a political and military mistake. Pictures of tanks in refugee camps are not positive images, and the entire operation will not help the Saudi peace initiative, one critic told UPI on condition of anonymity. He said he would speak up only after the troops leave the camps.
According to the initiative, put forward by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah in an interview with The New York Times, the Saudis would seek to normalize relations with Israel if Israel withdrew from territory it occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
In a front page commentary, Yediot Aharonot newspaper’s Alex Fishman wrote: "One must be drugged or a gambler to send in the army at this time. The code name that would best fit the operation is Casino Sharon," named for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"His decision to occupy a refugee camp is gambling at high stakes," Fishman added.
