TEL AVIV, Israel, April 13 (UPI) -- Whizzing bullets raced out of the darkness towards the army's fortified position at the edge of the Gaza Strip settlement of Kfar Darom. The company commander hurriedly assembled a small task force comprising a tank, an armored personnel carrier and a bulldozer, and set out. They killed one attacker but lost track of another.
The tank's advanced night vision equipment was of no help. Other soldiers, nearby, also saw no trace of the missing militant. An unmanned aerial vehicle found him. It flew overhead, saw him crawl towards the position, marked him with a laser beam, and the soldiers killed him.
The company commander, a captain with a South African accent, related that encounter to officers from 35 countries who came to Israel for a conference on Low Intensity Conflict Warfare.
The skirmish encapsulated some of the elements of the intifada: a lone settlement with an adjacent army position to defend it; in this case the enemy choosing the time, place and mode of attack; and the Israelis moving into the offensive as quickly as possible using their superior force and technology.
In the war against militants, like in "classical warfare ... the best defense remains the offensive approach," Military Chief of General Staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon said.
More than 10,000 soldiers are deployed in the West Bank alone, and are engaged "in very intensive activity round the clock," the commander of the West Bank division, Brig. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, told the conference.
There are hundreds of operations a day, including five to eight special operations, he said. Usually the activity goes on at night and that reduces friction with other Palestinians who should then be out of the way, he said.
Small teams dressed up as Arabs and armed with pistols carry out the most daring operations. They can enter an area unobtrusively, approach their target, stick a gun at him, and say in Arabic: "Follow us or you'll be hurt."
Such operations make militants feel uncomfortable even among their own people, Eisenkot maintained.
Palestinians have sometimes claimed the Israeli soldiers are too scared to leave their armored vehicles and fight man to man.
The soldiers' small arms should erode that notion of people braving tanks and "M-16 (rifles against) F-16 (planes)," Eisenkot said.
Units are often divided into teams "of four, even pairs, and thus operate for long periods," the head of the Central Command, Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, said.
Missions change rapidly and the Israelis extensively use helicopters to move troops around. Consequently sergeants and platoon commanders take many decisions that in other circumstances senior officers would make.
Small units with ample intelligence can be most effective, Eisenkot argued.
"When an operation is based on intelligence, which focuses the troops' activity, the success rate is higher than 90 percent," he said.
Large forces are deployed when alerts of an impending attack are too general. The army has then imposes curfews in towns and closures around them to prevent suicide bombers from leaving. The idea is "to create a dilemma for the enemy and try to disrupt its activity," Eisenkot said.
Occasionally large-scale operations are waged inside towns to regain freedom of action, "To be able to reach an attacker everywhere, when we want to," Kaplinsky said.
The aim, then, is not to seize territory and hold it.
Brig. Gen. Aviv Kochavi described a battle he had conducted in Nablus' old center when he commanded the 35th paratroop brigade. He called his tactic "surgical warfare."
A force would seize a house, set up a position, and wait for the enemy to fall into the trap or make a mistake. When that happened, soldiers would fire four, five or 10 bullets. Every half hour or so, one to five militants would be killed and the soldiers would move elsewhere. Sometimes they knocked down walls to pass through and not be exposed to enemy fire and booby traps. The soldiers advanced in zigzags so that the enemy could not guess where they would be next, Kochavi said.
There is no sense in occupying an area unless you hit the militants, he maintained.
"When you enter from several directions, fire four bullets here, 10 there, and sometimes extensive fire you cause chaos for the enemy," he added.
The situation is "totally different," in the Gaza Strip, the head of the Ground Forces Command, Maj. Gen. Yiftach Ron Tal, told United Press International. In the Palestinian sections of Gaza, a crowded urban area under effective Palestinian Authority control, Israel has no freedom of movement.
There it has launched more airborne "targeted killings." At least 135 Palestinians have been "extrajudicially executed" according to the Israeli human rights organization Btselem.
Ground operations begin with small units penetrating quietly, surrounding a wanted person's home, or rocket-manufacturing workshop. Then heavy armor and other units move in to back up the advance force, a military source said. Pitched battles ranged there in the last few raids.
Other measures are defensive and the main tool -- besides the intelligence gathering -- seems to be the barrier Israel erected around the Gaza Strip and is now building in and around the West Bank.
The Gaza fence is the older one, somewhat less sophisticated, but has prevented all of the hundreds of attempts to cross it, a senior military source said.
The barrier Israel is building in the West Bank has also proven its effectiveness.
It has forced West Bank suicide bombers to seek round-about routes to Israel, through areas where there is no fence yet. That detour sometimes led to their capture.
The barrier is not just a fence or an 8-meter high wall. It is a system that includes electro-optical devices, radar, and other means that allow soldiers to monitor "almost every meter along the fence." They see well across the line.
The Southern Command, for example, analyzed the access routes from Gaza. The moment it spots movement towards the fence, it alerts troops to block the anticipated incursion, and more units to form a second and third line of defense and catch the infiltrators should they manage to cross.
This, however, is not always suitable to the West Bank, places where Palestinian houses reach the boundary line and where Israeli roads and homes are close by. There, and in Jerusalem, Israel has built the wall.
It is an endless contest, the officers from the United States, China, Singapore, Jordan, Poland, the Czech Republic, Brazil and other countries were told.
The Gazans' have been improving their rockets that fly over the barrier and use tunnels to get under it.
In the southern Gaza Strip, an area of soft sand dunes, Palestinians pay children NIS 20 to 25 ($4.50 to $5) a day to dig tunnels, from their side, under the Israeli lines, to Egypt. Usually it takes three months to complete a tunnel, a senior officer said.
The tunnels are 15 meters deep and are usually used for only three or four months at a time, an officer continued. Then Palestinians cover the shaft with cement, dump sand on it, and "you see nothing," he said.
Arms smuggling thus continues and the Israelis built a steel wall at the border. Part of it is buried underground. The Israelis drill 10 to 15 meter deep holes near the border, insert explosives and detonate them to create a "ball of destruction" to ruin the tunnels. When it has enough intelligence, it will enter Palestinian quarters to look for the tunnels' exits, the officer said.
The bottom line, however, is that military force alone cannot end the intifada.
The Palestinians have been paying a heavy price in casualties, arrests, a ruined economy and a weak political system, but their motivation to continue fighting remains high.
Attempts to "carry out almost daily attacks ... remain the same" though they are less effective, said Eisenkot.
He noted security authorities have foiled 96 percent of the planned suicide bombings. Eighty-six percent of those attempts were blocked even before the bomber set out.
But one painful suicide bombing overshadows all the other foilings, officers noted.
Yaalon ridiculed Israeli hard-liners who used to demand the government give the army a freer hand.
"Let the army win," those hard-liners used to say.
Yaalon insisted, "Direct activity against the terror operatives cannot on its own bring about a decisive conclusion to the confrontation."
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's trip to Washington this week, to discuss a unilateral, limited withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the northern West Bank seems a tacit admission of that.
Nearly 2,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces and at least 860 Israelis have been slain by Palestinians since the start of the intifada in September 2000, according to Btselem.
