JERUSALEM (REUTERS) — The Israeli army maintained its hold on the Palestinian city of Ramallah Wednesday, but its biggest offensive in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 35 years failed to stop a wave of attacks inside Israel.
At least 41 people were killed on both sides of the conflict Tuesday, another day of death in the double digits ahead of the expected arrival Thursday of U.S. Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni on a truce mission.
“Zinni will not succeed if we do not help him,” Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the leading dove in Israel’s coalition government, said on Channel Two television in implicit criticism of the two-week-old West Bank and Gaza campaign now involving 20,000 troops.
Some 150 armored vehicles, including tanks, thrust into Ramallah and nearby refugee camps Tuesday, tearing up roads and crushing cars in the main Palestinian commercial and political hub in the West Bank, witnesses said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his harshest criticism of Israel, urged it to stop “the bombing of civilian areas, the assassinations, the unnecessary use of lethal force, the demolitions and the daily humiliation of ordinary Palestinians.”
The invasion force stayed out of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in the city, and Israel’s army chief, Lieutenant-General Shaul Mofaz, reiterated in comments to reporters that Israel had no plans to topple or to harm him.
Gunmen fired at troops who went from house to house in Ramallah, a city of more than 200,000, searching for weapons and militants.
At least five Palestinians were killed in the city and another was shot dead during a gun battle in the West Bank town of Hebron.
The latest operations represented Israel’s biggest offensive in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since it seized the two areas in the 1967 Middle East war.
Ramallah and other Palestinian cities are governed by Arafat’s Palestinian Authority under interim peace deals with Israel.
GUNMEN ATTACK ISRAELIS NEAR BORDER WITH LEBANON
Hours after tanks occupied Ramallah, trapping Arafat in his office, two gunmen disguised as Israeli soldiers killed six Israelis near the Lebanese border before troops shot them dead.
The attack raised fears in Israel of a second front in the north, while the battle against a 17-month-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip raged on.
But Major-General Gaby Ashkenazy, chief of Israel’s northern command, said in an evening briefing it was unclear whether the gunmen had come from Lebanon or from Palestinian-ruled areas.
The cycle of violence threatened to derail Zinni’s third Middle East mission before it starts. It was also increasingly overshadowing a Middle East tour by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney aimed at exploring a consensus against Iraq. Cheney was due in Egypt Wednesday after visiting Jordan Tuesday.
Israeli troops and tanks had battled their way into the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip earlier Tuesday, killing at least 17 Palestinians in fierce fighting, Palestinian hospital sources and witnesses said.
Nine Palestinians were killed in other violence in Gaza and an Israeli was shot dead in a West Bank ambush.
At least 1,056 Palestinians and 340 Israelis have been killed since the uprising began.
BATTLES IN GAZA, WEST BANK
Colonel Gad Hirsch, head of Israeli military operations in the West Bank, said soldiers had captured dozens of “hardcore” militants, confiscated weapons arsenals and located bomb-making factories in sweeps of refugee camps in recent days.
Some of the detainees were forced to stand blindfolded with their hands tied and stripped to their waists, witnesses said.
In an incident that embarrassed Israel, a state founded after the Nazi Holocaust that killed six million Jews, soldiers marked identification numbers on the arms of Palestinians arrested in one of the sweeps earlier this week.
Arafat, drawing a comparison with numbers tattooed on the arms of Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, told Abu Dhabi television Monday that the Israeli army’s conduct during the sweeps amounted to “new Nazi racism.”
Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said in a statement Tuesday that he took a grave view of the practice and “instructed all security authorities to stop it immediately.”
Tuesday, witnesses said, troops rounded up at least 170 Palestinians from Ramallah and nearby towns. Many of them were taken, blindfolded and with hands tied, to an army base for questioning.