Search and Destroy in Gaza

By Romesh Ratnesar, Phil Zabriskie/ Gaza

If you had to search for a missing person, few places in the world would be more forbidding than the sandy 28-mile-long sliver of land known as the Gaza Strip. Its cities are a chaotic maze of dusty alleyways lined by warrens of crumbling buildings that each seem indistinguishable from the next. The 1.4 million people who live there make it the most densely populated patch of land on earth. At times, the streets and souks can become a suffocating crush of human congestion. And the task of finding a lost soul is made more hazardous by the long-held air of suspicion and gangs of gunmen ready to open fire on outsiders who tread on their turf.

Somewhere in that inhospitable landscape, Corporal Gilad Shalit, 19, a soldier in the Israeli army, awaited his fate last week. Abducted by Palestinian militants at an army post in Israel and smuggled into Gaza on June 25, he might not have known that his captivity had set off a furious Israeli campaign to try to save him--and in the process, propelled both sides to the brink of full-scale warfare. While surveillance drones buzzed overhead, some 7,000 troops, 80 Israeli tanks and 180 armored personnel carriers massed at the border with Gaza, territory Israel evacuated less than a year ago. The Israelis seized Gaza's dilapidated airport to prevent Shalit's kidnappers from moving him out, with units ready to mount a rescue raid if Israeli intelligence or its informants picked up word of Shalit's whereabouts. Had the offensive stopped there, it might have seemed to most people a defensibly legitimate, if extraordinarily intense, operation for a single soldier's life.

But it didn't stop there. Whatever support the Israelis had for the mission was undermined by the lead-footed way in which it was carried out. In the first days of the operation, Israeli warplanes wrecked three bridges and several roads inside Gaza. The F-16s overhead repeatedly broke the sound barrier, producing thunderous sonic booms on the ground. Most shocking was Israel's destruction of all six transformers at Gaza's central power plant, cutting off electricity to 45% of the territory's inhabitants. Israeli officials insisted they took such measures to aid in the hunt for Shalit, but few Palestinians believed it. In their eyes, the Israeli assault on Gaza's basic infrastructure had less to do with finding the missing soldier than inflicting collective punishment. "We have learned from past experience that Israel uses the opportunity to implement scenarios and schemes it has," says Rafiq Husseini, chief of staff to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "It's obviously not about one soldier."

He may be right. The Israeli offensive sent a message not just to the militants holding Shalit but also to the Palestinian leadership, which Israel accuses of abetting rising violence against Israeli soldiers and citizens. A senior Israeli security official says some members of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government believe the crisis is an opportunity to smash the authority of Hamas, the militant organization that won control of the Palestinian Authority in elections earlier this year. That aim became evident when Israeli forces arrested eight Palestinian Cabinet ministers and 40 Hamas parliamentarians in the West Bank, who may be charged with membership in terrorist organizations, affiliation with terrorist leadership and other violations. Israeli Interior Minister Ronnie Bar-On tells TIME that the arrests had been planned for weeks and that the ministers would not be used as bargaining tools to win Shalit's release. But with one-third of the Hamas-led Cabinet in jail and much of the rest of it hiding from the threat of assassination by Israeli air strikes, the moves effectively rendered the Hamas government impotent--a reality Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya acknowledged in a public appearance in Gaza City last Friday. "They aim to topple the government," he said.

That strategy, though, carries dangers. Already Palestinian militants have retaliated for the Israeli assault--which, for all its ferocity, killed one Palestinian fighter in three days--by kidnapping and murdering an Israeli teenager. The fallout from the Shalit saga is only hardening attitudes on both sides, making the Bush Administration's goal of forging a Middle East peace deal and a Palestinian state more remote. To Israelis, the soldier's abduction and the Palestinians' initial failure to secure his release have highlighted the fecklessness of both Hamas and Abbas, until now the one Palestinian leader acceptable to Israel. Among the Palestinians, the perception that Israel has acted unlawfully by trying to undermine their elected leaders will probably strengthen Hamas, not weaken it. And by leaving the Gaza Strip in tatters, the Israelis risk planting even deeper seeds of hate. If the situation worsens, says Husseini, "the losers would be the Israelis as well [as the Palestinians] because they will not have peace. They will not even have the chance of peace."

Even before Shalit's kidnapping, it would have been a stretch to call the atmosphere placid. For months Gaza militants have fired homemade rockets at Israeli towns, usually missing but causing some injuries and great misery, and drawing Israeli artillery barrages in response. Tensions escalated early last month after seven members of a Palestinian family died in a Gaza beach explosion, which Palestinians blamed on an errant Israeli artillery shell. (Israel denied responsibility.) That prompted Hamas leaders to renounce a 16-month-old cease-fire with Israel, giving an array of Palestinian guerrilla groups the green light to stage a high-profile attack.

According to an Israeli military-intelligence officer, the June 25 assault on the Kerem Shalom army post was weeks in the planning. Two days before the raid, Israeli special forces kidnapped two Hamas militants in Rafah, Gaza. After interrogating the detainees, the troops alerted military commanders that an attack was imminent. "The alert didn't include the color of the underwear of the militants," says the officer. "But it was very specific." It wasn't enough. At 5:30 a.m. on June 25, six Palestinian militants emerged from a tunnel dug 10 yds. deep and stretching from a private house on the Palestinian side of the border to the rear of the Israeli base. Two of the militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a tank carrying four Israeli soldiers, including Shalit. Two soldiers jumped from the tank and were shot dead. The militants dragged Shalit away and smuggled him through a hole cut in the fence separating Gaza and Israel. When reinforcements finally arrived, they found Shalit's bloody vest, suggesting he had been wounded in the grab.

The Israelis believe Shalit was taken to a hiding place that had been prepared in advance, probably a cellar or cave under a house in the area surrounding Rafah, a teeming city of refugee camps of some 250,000 people. Three separate groups claimed responsibility for the abduction, including the military wing of Hamas, which Israel charged was acting on the directions of Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas supremo in Damascus (see box). Two days into the Gaza incursion, Olmert ordered Israeli forces to halt their advance to allow for a mediation push by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On Friday, Mubarak claimed that Hamas had agreed to release Shalit, but Shalit's captors demanded the release of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, which Israel refused. Haniya's spokesman, Ghazi Hamad, told TIME that was the militants' demand, not the government's. "We want to avoid further escalation and end this problem very quickly." But the Israeli intelligence officer says even if a deal were brokered, the kidnappers might have gone so far underground that they would have had no way of hearing about it. Hamas' record is sobering: of the dozen soldiers it has kidnapped since 1988, all have been killed.

That, in part, explains the ardor of the Israelis' effort to find Shalit. Olmert, who took office after Ariel Sharon's stroke in January, had little choice but to go into Gaza, given the Israeli public's deep identification with the army, in which most Israeli citizens have served. Lacking any counterpart on the Palestinian side that it trusts, Israel has taken a "shake the trees" approach, putting as much pressure as possible on the government and civilian population in the hopes that someone would turn on Hamas. But it's difficult to see how some Israeli tactics, particularly the strike on the Gaza power supply, can do much other than deepen the Palestinians' misery. Already crippled by the West's financial blockade against the Hamas government, the Palestinian Authority, along with U.N. offices in Gaza, must now find a way to run sanitation systems, water supplies and hospitals with nearly half the power down--in 90DEG heat. "I'm not sure how depriving half the population of electricity will help Shalit get released," said Alvaro de Soto, the U.N.'s chief envoy to the Middle East. "I really can't imagine what they were thinking."

Whether Israel can succeed in bringing down Hamas is also questionable. In Gaza there are signs that the Israeli offensive has bolstered support for the beleaguered Hamas leadership. In Rafah and other Gaza cities, Hamas' resistance to the pressure is being seen as almost heroic. Even if the government falls, Hamas won't go away. Indeed, a collapse could boost the group's more militant factions, which would prefer to abandon the political process and return to armed struggle. "This will help Hamas because they have been saying they do not trust the Israelis," says Saied Zourob, an official in Gaza who belongs to Fatah, the party of Abbas, who called for Shalit's release. "Abbas has been saying that people should respect them and the peace process, but now the Israelis are pushing people toward Hamas and the resistance."

Lost amid the uproar last week was a small reason for optimism: an agreement between Hamas and Fatah to begin talking about forming a unity government that went further toward recognizing Israel's existence than Hamas had ever done before (without actually doing so). That raises the possibility that Israel might eventually be persuaded to restart negotiations with the Palestinians rather than pursue solutions on its own. But will the Israelis be in a mood to talk anytime soon? "Things are so confused and not conducive to any kind of peace process," says Walid Awad, an Abbas aide in the West Bank. "An element of good judgment and patience is missing." It may be a while before it comes back.

With reporting by Christopher Allbritton, Aaron J. Klein/ Jerusalem