Israel's army likely to occupy Palestine's cities for months

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Israel's army is giving strong signs it plans to spend months -- perhaps as much as a year -- on the streets of Palestinian cities as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government undertakes its most sustained effort yet to stop suicide bombings.

From Israel's perspective, the three-week-old offensive has been a triumph, cutting Palestinian attacks sharply without drawing the blasts of international criticism provoked by earlier operations.

One soldier and no Israeli civilians have been killed in more than three weeks, making this one of the quietest periods in Israel since the Mideast violence erupted almost two years ago. More than 30 Palestinians have been killed by the army in the same period. The victims have ranged from militants at the top of Israel's most wanted list to seven children the army says were killed by mistake.

In earlier incursions, Israeli forces tended not to linger in Palestinian areas. But then came a trio of Palestinian attacks June 18-20 that killed 31 Israeli civilians, including five children. This time, with Operation Determined Path, the army has begun an open-ended occupation of Palestinian areas in the West Bank.

Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin says Israel has concluded it can only prevent suicide bombings "when we are there, when we are preventing the terrorists from leaving their homes with their suicide belts, capturing them at the doorstep of their homes, not at the doorstep of the bus."

To an Israeli population battered by more than 70 suicide bombings in less than two years, such operations are highly popular, regardless of the international criticism and the burden on Israel's economy.

"Until there's a better alternative, I expect this is what we're going to see. For Israel, it's the least bad option right now," said Mark Heller, a political analyst at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

As an air of semi-permanence sets in, Israeli and Palestinian officials are talking about easing the restrictions, and curfews have been lifted more often in recent days, with troops pulling back from the city centers in the morning, and then returning in the afternoon.

But senior Palestinian leaders expect an indefinite Israeli army presence, claiming it's part of a larger plan by Sharon's government to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and seize West Bank land the Palestinians want for a future state.

"We believe the Israeli army intends to reoccupy the Palestinian cities, and all of the West Bank, for a very long period," said Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. Sharon would like to confine Palestinians to small islands of territory "and call this a Palestinian provisional state," he added.

"This is not a state, it is just a disguised form of Israeli control and occupation," Abed Rabbo said.

The army has taken over seven of the eight main cities in the West Bank. The curfews cover about one-third of the 2.1 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and effectively immobilize many others in outlying villages who can't reach the cities to work, shop or go to school.

For Mohammed Abu Ajamieh, it means commuting to work by ambulance.

Abu Ajamieh, who runs the Health Ministry's Department of Engineering and Maintenance, lives in Ramallah, but his office is in Nablus, 20 miles north. Earlier Israeli restrictions on moving between West Bank cities made that daily trip impossible, so he set up a small office near his home.

Now under curfew, he often can't make it across town to his new office. But ambulances can still move about, and as a key official in the Health Ministry, he often takes them to and from the main hospital, and works from there.

Every evening, Abu Ajamieh's family catches the news to learn whether the curfew will be lifted in Ramallah the following day. Some days it's removed from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., other days not at all.

"Our kids ask all the time whether they can go out tomorrow," said Abu Ajamieh, who has sons aged 11 and 8. "How do you explain that they have to stay at home and can't see their friends?"

Ramallah is the Palestinian political headquarters in the West Bank -- and the launching pad for many suicide bombers who have struck in Jerusalem, just a few miles to the south -- and so it has received close Israeli scrutiny.

But Israeli troops are also in firm control of Jenin, Nablus, Qalqiliya, Tulkarem, Bethlehem and Hebron.

The United States and Israel also have demanded that the Palestinians overhaul their leadership and security forces. But Palestinians ask how they are supposed to carry out wide-ranging restructuring when the restrictions shut all government offices before 2 p.m.

President Bush "is stressing reform, but he is completely neglecting the reoccupation, the military curfew, the siege imposed on the Palestinian people," said Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian minister.

Palestinians plan January elections for a leader and a parliament, but under current conditions, candidates couldn't campaign freely in their hometowns, let alone travel to other areas.

Israel argues that the Palestinian leadership has had plenty of opportunities to reform, and in particular, to draw on its security forces to crack down on militants. Now, Israel says, it will handle security itself.

Israel is holding about 1,800 Palestinians suspected of involvement in violence, and says virtually all senior militants in the West Bank have either been arrested or killed.

The current situation has raised comparisons to Israel's occupation of Palestinian areas before peace negotiations began in 1993 and the army began pulling out of Palestinian population centers.

Israel says it doesn't want the burden of civil administration of Palestinian areas, though it's not clear how the Palestinian government will be able function effectively if the current restrictions remain for months.

A decline in violence could prompt an easing of restrictions, but Israel says is doesn't want to repeat the recent past, when military withdrawals were soon followed by another spate of bombings.