February 15, 2002 Arabs Deploy New Explosive Against Tank; 3 Israelis Die By JAMES BENNET JERUSALEM, Feb. 14 ·For the first time, Palestinian militants destroyed an Israeli tank tonight, planting a mine that punched through the tank's belly, killing at least three soldiers and lightly wounding a fourth.
The tank was ripped apart as it responded to what the Israeli Army described as a coordinated attack on a settlers' convoy after it entered the Gaza Strip headed for Netzarim, an isolated Jewish settlement.
A bomb had exploded beside the settlers' bus, which was bulletproof, and gunmen opened fire on the convoy. No one was injured in that attack. But as the tank rushed to the scene, it rolled over the mine, which penetrated the tank and exploded inside, the army said.
"This is really warfare, in the conventional sense," said Jacob Dallal, an Israeli Army spokesman. "This is something we've never seen before from the Palestinians." The Palestinian attack followed a sweeping Israeli incursion Wednesday into three Gaza towns during which soldiers killed five Palestinians.
The Salahadin Brigade, a group composed of members of Hamas and Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the attack on the settler convoy in a statement sent to the Reuters news agency. The group said it was retaliating for the Israeli attack. The group is the military wing of the Popular Resistance Committees, a Fatah-dominated organization in the Gaza refugee camps.
[Early Friday morning, Israeli tanks and troops raided a Palestinian-controlled village in the West Bank, killing one militant and arresting another, the Israeli Army said. [Israeli forces swept into Saida, north of the city of Tulkarm, just after dawn and came under fire from gunmen in the village, the army and witnesses told Reuters. The witnesses said troops demolished one house belonging to a member of the militant group Islamic Jihad.]
The Israeli raid Wednesday was, in turn, a reponse to an attack Sunday that Israel called an escalation in the conflict: Two crude Hamas rockets, the first, were fired from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel.
The army described the mine that exploded under the tank as similar to weapons used by the Lebanese group Hezbollah against Israeli forces in South Lebanon. Israel withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000.
Israeli officials have expressed concern at what they describe as growing ties between Hezbollah, or Party of God, and Palestinian organizations, including Fatah. A clear threat of antitank weapons could force the Israeli military to rethink its tactics. Until now, Israeli soldiers seemed invulnerable as they moved through Palestinian-controlled territory inside armored vehicles.
The attack occurred at about 9 p.m. along the road to Netzarim, a single lane of asphalt that cuts across a main north-south Gaza road at a junction that has been a main flashpoint of the 16-month conflict.
The settlers' road passes through a no man's land of sandy soil gouged by tank treads. For scores of yards on either side, Palestinian orange groves have been leveled because, Israelis say, snipers were using them to hide.
The tank was in that no man's land, about 60 yards south of the road, when it was blown up, the army said. "We heard an explosion and saw a blue flash in the orchard area," the bus driver told Israeli television. The bus, which had not yet reached the junction, turned back to leave Gaza.
The tank was a Merkava, the Israeli-made flagship vehicle of the army. Late tonight, the army was still trying to identify the dead soldiers.
About 6,000 settlers live in 22 settlements in the Gaza Strip, surrounded by a million Palestinians. A few hundred live in Netzarim, a fenced and heavily guarded compound. Today, hours after completing its raid on the three Gaza towns, Beit Hanun, Beit Lahiya and Deir al-Balah, Israel released 16 of the 18 Palestinians arrested in the sweep. The operation was planned to round up militants and destroy factories that made the two Hamas rockets, known as Qassam-2's. The rockets fell into fields, injuring no one. The Israeli Army was sharply criticized in the press here today for responding so aggressively to the rocket firings. But Benjamin Ben- Eliezer, the defense minister, said that use of Qassam-2's "crosses our red lines."
Early this morning in Ramallah, in the West Bank, Mr. Arafat made up with a top security official with whom he clashed on Monday night, Palestinian officials said. A group of Palestinian officials intervened in the dispute and brought the security chief, Jibril Rajoub, to Mr. Arafat's compound at about 2:30 this morning to iron things out. The two men hugged, according to a knowledgeable Palestinian.