'All-out war' on Hamas kills 1

As Israelis launch a missile attack, Palestinians scramble to get their bickering leaders to talk to each other again.

JERUSALEM - In the sixth Israeli airstrike in less than two weeks, helicopter gunships fired four missiles at a car in heavy traffic in Gaza City on Monday, killing at least one member of Hamas and wounding at least 20 other people.

The attack was part of what the Israeli defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, called an "all-out war" against Hamas. It began after a Hamas suicide bomber killed 21 people aboard a Jerusalem bus on Aug. 19.

Since then, Israel has killed at least 11 members of Hamas, including a top political leader, and three Palestinian civilians.

Israeli officials are threatening a broad invasion of the Gaza Strip if Hamas continues to fire crude rockets over Gaza's fenced boundary into Israel. Israeli news reports quoted the Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, as telling the Cabinet that he had readied a brigade for a possible move into Gaza.

While conducting numerous raids in and out of Gaza over the last year, Israel has also periodically threatened a major invasion of the densely populated coastal strip. The warnings have grown louder as an U.S.-backed peace plan has deflated over the last two weeks.

Palestinian officials trying to mediate between veteran Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his beleaguered prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, said the two are no longer on speaking terms.

The two men, who have worked together for decades, have bickered frequently since Arafat reluctantly appointed Abbas in the spring. So far, the pattern has been for Abbas to threaten his resignation, and then for a face-saving compromise to be worked out. Like Israel, the Bush administration has refused to deal directly with Arafat.

Palestinian legislators say they are considering as a compromise a seven-member national security council, with Arafat at its head and Abbas at his side.

But Palestinian officials are also expressing mounting irritation with both leaders, complaining that both are letting petty politics distract them at a critical time. They say the impasse has grown quite bitter. In Gaza, Muhammad Abu Sharia, the leader of the general personnel council, an administrative body, continued Monday to refuse to step down from his post, despite having been replaced by Abbas and his Cabinet days ago.

Israel says it will not negotiate with a Palestinian government handpicked by Arafat, should the unpopular Abbas be ousted in a Parliament vote.

Abbas has failed to reach two major objectives, persuading Palestinian terrorists to halt violence and improving the daily lives of his people through progress on the road map.

His standing has been further undermined by Israel's relentless strikes against Hamas in retaliation for an Aug. 19 bus bombing that killed 21 people in Jerusalem.

In Monday's strike, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a car carrying three Hamas members, killing one and wounding a second, while the third got away. Twenty-five bystanders were also hurt.

The dead man was identified as Khader Houssre, a 36-year-old Hamas member.

The missiles hit as the car drove along a crowded side street in downtown Gaza City. "I rushed outside, and saw a car like a ball of fire," said witness Salman Abu Nur, 42, a printer.

The apparent target of the attack was Monzer Kaneeta, a member of Izzedine al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas. Palestinian witnesses said Kaneeta and another member of the armed faction leapt from their white Subaru when the first missile struck a nearby wall.

The occupants of the car had been firing rockets at Israeli towns and Jewish settlements, Israeli Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir said.

A Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, denounced the strike as "a brutal crime" and said the group would retaliate.

Mofaz, the defense minister, told Israel's Cabinet that the Jerusalem bus bombing changed the rules of the conflict. Israel will now "fight to the bitter end" against Hamas, Mofaz said, according to a statement summarizing his remarks.

Yaalon, the army chief, told the ministers he was prepared to launch a ground invasion into the Gaza Strip if necessary.

Yaalon was not referring to a broad invasion that would require drafting reserve troops, but rather a smaller-scale operation using up to one brigade, or some 3,000 troops, Cabinet Secretary Yisrael Meimon said.

In the past three years of fighting, Israel has carried out several ground offensives in Gaza but has shied away from reoccupying large areas of the densely populated coastal strip, focusing instead on airstrikes.

In the past two years, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have fired dozens of rockets at Israeli settlements and border towns, causing minor damage and injuries.

Israel considers the rockets a strategic threat, and the Defense Ministry said it plans to build 40 to 50 bunker-type rooms to protect Gaza settlers from rockets and mortars.

In Cairo, meanwhile, the Abbas government resumed truce talks with Hamas, despite the prime minister's pledge after the Jerusalem bus bombing to cut off contacts with the group.

Palestinians declared a unilateral cease-fire June 29 but later changed the terms, saying they would retaliate for killings by Israeli troops.

In the West Bank, troops critically wounded a 15-year-old Palestinian in a clash with hundreds of stone-throwing youths in the city of Nablus, a hospital doctor said.

In the incident, a firebomb was thrown at a tank, setting off a fire, and soldiers responded with shots from a machine gun, said a Palestinian medic, Ala Aratrut.

The Israeli military had no official comment.

JERUSALEM - In a scathing report on Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens, a public inquiry Monday castigated the Israeli government and police force for their heavy-handed, chaotic response to riots three years ago in which 13 Arabs were killed at the beginning of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada.

The report, released after months of anticipation, condemned Israeli police for using excessive force - including snipers firing live rounds - to quell demonstrations by Israeli Arabs in support of Palestinians in the West Bank and for treating Arab citizens as a "hostile element" within Israeli society.

The report also blamed the government of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak for failing to perceive and predict the depth of anger of Israel's 1-million Arabs, who have complained for years of being relegated to second-class status and discriminated against in everything from jobs to housing and education.

The panel of two judges and an academic urged the government to come up with a detailed plan for narrowing the gaps between Jewish and Arab citizens, who make up about one-fifth of the population of 6.6-million people.

The document - the product of three years of investigation - was based on the testimony of 377 witnesses and only the fifth inquiry of such scope in Israel's history.

Israeli police officials said they were studying the report's findings. They said they have already improved training, increased the number of non-Jewish officers and more than doubled the number of community policing centers in Arab-Israeli areas to prevent a repeat of the fatal clashes of October 2000.

- Information from the Associated Press, New York Times, Cox News Service, Los Angeles Times and Knight Ridder Newspapers was used in this report.

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