NABI SALEH, West Bank _ Israeli forces killed at least five Palestinians and injured about 20 more during a massive raid early Wednesday morning on a remote West Bank village where suspects in the assassination of an Israeli Cabinet minister were believed to be hiding.
The raid was staged just hours after President Bush asked Israel to curb its forays into Palestinian-controlled territories.
Eleven Palestinians were arrested in the black-of-night blitz in Beit Rima, one of the most violent in a year of fighting. Israel is hunting suspects in the murder last week of ultra-right Tourism Minister Revaham Ze’evi.
Israeli forces killed five other Palestinians on Wednesday in West Bank towns.
Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have expressed concern that the surge in Middle East violence could sabotage efforts to bring moderate Arab countries into a coalition to fight international terrorism. “I think at this time, it would be appropriate for the Israeli government to immediately withdraw from the … villages they have occupied,” Powell said Wednesday in Washington.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, speaking at a memorial service for Ze’evi in the parliament, said: “We have made clear that we have no intention of remaining,” adding, “when we are done with our mission we will leave.”
Israeli officials said the dead included two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which claimed responsibility for Ze’evi’s death. Members of Hamas and Palestinian security forces also were killed Wednesday, Israel said.
The raid began around 2 a.m. Witnesses said it involved a dozen tanks and armored personnel carriers, two helicopter gunships, two huge armored bulldozers and hundreds of special forces troops with faces painted in black-and-green combat camouflage.
The action occurred about a mile from the military checkpoint in Nabi Saleh. Israeli troops barred entry to the media, Palestinian ambulances and the International Red Cross.
“Some people were killed in houses. Others on the street,” said Abdel Salaam Rimawi, 25, a resident of Beit Rima, speaking low into the telephone because Israeli soldiers were outside his door.
Amid “shooting from all directions,” Rimawi said, he took his wife and year-old baby to his brother’s house in what he thought would be a safer part of the village. Then Israeli troops hauled his brother away, possibly because he was a nurse and was needed to treat the wounded.
Dr. Bassam Rimawi, another resident of the village of 5,000, which takes its name from the large clan of Rimawis living there, said in a telephone interview that he treated several of the injured, including two men who were shot in the abdomen.
Dr. Rimawi, director of emergency services at Ramallah Hospital and minister of health for the Palestinian Authority, said power cables in Beit Rima were hit, knocking out electricity to parts of the village. He said he saw three bodies riddled with bullet holes. The Israelis destroyed some buildings with bulldozers and explosives, Dr. Rimawi said, and the demolition was continuing into the night.
Palestinian Cabinet minister Ziad Abu Ziad called the raid “a crime and real terror.”
The Israeli Army’s West Bank commander, Brig. Gen. Gershon Yitzhak, said his troops met armed resistance upon entering the village and returned fire.
“We put additional medical crews into the village in order to treat Palestinian wounded, and provided them immediate and devoted care,” Yitzhak added. The most critically wounded were taken to Tel Hashomer hospital near Tel Aviv, Israel, he said.
Israeli troops on Wednesday afternoon were still denying entry to two Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances and a white jeep from the International Red Cross.
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After Ze’evi was murdered last week in a Jerusalem hotel, Sharon demanded that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat arrest the killers and turn them over to Israel.
Sharon spokesman Ranaan Gissin said Israel told the Palestinian Authority that militants linked to Ze’evi’s assassination were in Beit Rima, and that they raided the village only after Palestinian security forces did not arrest them.
In Washington, Powell repeated the administration’s call for Israeli forces to leave Palestinian villages without delay. He did not endorse the demand by some Israelis that Arafat turn over the suspects to them. But the suspects should be “not just in some form of light house arrest, where they can walk out anytime they wish,” Powell said.
The U.S. pressure campaign over Israel’s West Bank incursions, and the two allies’ differing views of the war on terrorism, has led to the worst U.S.-Israeli friction in years.
In a telling sign, U.S. diplomats at the United Nations on Wednesday drafted a statement calling on Israel to pull back from the West Bank and on Arafat to apprehend those responsible for Ze’evi’s murder, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. In the past, Washington has vetoed virtually any U.N. Security Council action on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The statement, to be issued in the name of the council’s president, Ireland, was put on hold late Wednesday after diplomats received signs Israel might pull back anyway, the official said.
Some in Washington thought Sharon would respond to the U.S. pressure. Sharon “wants to stay on the right side of the U.S., and he wants to keep (dovish Foreign Minister Shimon) Peres in the government,” said David Makovksy, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research center.
But Bush administration pressure in Israel has sparked criticism on Capitol Hill, where sympathy for the Jewish nation is strong. Several lawmakers grilled Powell during his appearance Wednesday before the House International Relations Committee over the State Department’s criticism of Israel’s policy of “targeted assassination” of terrorism suspects.
The tension between Bush and Sharon has prompted a steady stream of high-level Israeli visitors to Washington, the latest being Dan Meridor, a top national security aide to the prime minister. Sharon is due in the United States the second week of November.
There were three other fatal incidents Wednesday in the West Bank:
_In Tulkarem, Israeli soldiers said they spotted three armed Palestinians who were about to open fire and shot them. Palestinians said the soldiers ambushed the three, firing from a cemetery.
_In Bethlehem, the Paradise Hotel, an Israeli military position, was set ablaze, apparently by Palestinians throwing firebombs. A 55-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed as he drove near downtown during the ensuing gun battles.
_In Abu Dis, a Palestinian man was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. The army said the man had been throwing firebombs at the soldiers, who responded by firing rubber-coated steel bullets.
On a road south of Hebron, six Palestinians were wounded when the taxi carrying them to work was fired on in a drive-by shooting. Witnesses said the shooters appeared to be Jewish settlers. The Israeli Army is investigating.
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© 2001, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
