Gaza Strip violence subsides; both sides grieving

JERUSALEM -- Israelis and Palestinians began burying their dead yesterday from the Gaza Strip's worst spasm of violence in more than 3 years of conflict, as debate intensified over the presence of Jewish settlers and Israeli troops in the seaside territory.

The main Israeli military cemetery in Jerusalem held back-to-back funerals for four slain Israeli soldiers, whose young comrades in the purple berets of their Givati Brigade wept openly at their rocky, flower-bedecked graves.

More such funerals were to come. Israel yesterday was preoccupied with retrieving what remains it could of five soldiers killed Wednesday when a blast hit a troop carrier packed with explosives in the southern Gaza Strip.

One of the six Israeli soldiers killed when their armored personnel carrier was blown up amid fighting on the outskirts of Gaza City early Tuesday was buried in his hometown outside Ashkelon, and another was to be laid to rest in his native Serbia.

The 11 deaths represented Israel's worst two-day losses in Gaza since fighting erupted in September 2000.

In Gaza City, whole Palestinian families wandered dazed and bereft amid a swath of devastation left by two days of fierce fighting in what had been the bustling neighborhood of Zeitoun, on the city's southern fringes.

Funerals with marchers waving the green flags of Hamas and the yellow flags of Islamic Jihad wound their way through the shattered streets of the district, where pitched battles between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli troops began at dawn Tuesday and lasted into yesterday morning.

More than two dozen Palestinians were killed in three days of fighting in Gaza, hospital officials said. Eleven died yesterday in two Israeli missile strikes in the southern town of Rafah, and a 12th man was shot dead in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, witnesses said.

During the Israeli incursion in Zeitoun -- which began with a hunt by Israeli troops for workshops that make rockets and mortars launched by Palestinian militants at Jewish settlements and Israeli towns -- soldiers flooded the district, while tanks rumbled in the narrow streets and combat helicopters buzzed overhead.

One of the soldiers killed in Wednesday's explosion of an armored personnel carrier was Lior Vishinsky, son of Shlomo Vishinsky, one of Israel's best-known stage actors.

"The funeral cortege should leave from Likud headquarters," a furious Vishinsky told reporters, referring to the conservative party of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. On May 2, the Likud rank-and-file resoundingly voted down a plan to withdraw from Gaza.

Sharon is reworking his initiative, but says its broad outlines will remain the same.