Israel looks to secure Gaza prior to pull out

The Israeli army launched a massive military campaign in the southern end of the Gaza Strip Tuesday, killing 18 Palestinians - seven of them armed, it says. Israel is gambling that the upshot of an aggressive foray to cut off the flow of weapons from neighboring Egypt would outweigh the international condemnation of the offensive.

In what may be the largest Israeli army operation in Gaza since the 1967 Six Day War, Israeli helicopters attacked the area of Rafah overnight with missile and machine-gun fire. It is continuing to widen and flatten a corridor that Israel says is used for smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip from neighboring Egypt.

The spiraling violence is not a routine flare-up in hostilities, but the product of an attempt to shape the future of a Gaza that many here expect will soon see an Israeli withdrawal, despite Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent failure to gain his party's support for his pull-out plan.

The major invasion comes after a week in which 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in the Gaza Strip in sophisticated ambush attacks by Palestinian militants. The Israeli public's expectation that there would be some response from the army made an opportune moment, analysts say, to implement long-standing plans to widen the Philadelphia Corridor that separates the Gaza Strip from Egypt, which controlled it until Israel occupied it in the Six Day War.

In so doing, Israel may effectively create a buffer zone that would be difficult to penetrate, making it harder for Palestinian militant groups to get new weapons and ammunition via underground tunnels. The timing for the operation is bolstered by the argument among strategic hawks here that Israel can put itself in a more secure position now and prevent heavier attacks on its soil later.

"This plan was on the shelf, but it was really on the agenda for a long time, and just now they grabbed the opportunity to do it," says Akiva Eldar, an analyst who writes for the Haaretz newspaper. "Everyone knows Sharon wants to get out of there, and we know there are tunnels there that weapons are flowing through. Even for the Israeli peace camp, the idea of a security zone like we had in Lebanon doesn't look like a radical thing."

It may, however, look that way to the rest of the world, where criticism of Israel's campaign in Gaza mounted. The raid, coming on the heels of Israel's demolition of homes in the area in recent days, has drawn condemnation and calls for restraint from the United Nations and the European Union. Arab nations have asked for a special session of the UN Security Council.

Additionally, a new report by human rights watchdog Amnesty International charged that Israel has engaged in "war crimes" in an "unjustified destruction of thousands of Palestinian and Arab Israeli homes," demolishing more than 3,000 homes since the start of the second intifada in September 2000. The The demolitions have left tens of thousands of people homeless, Amnesty says.

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