7 Palestinians, 2 Israelis Die in Violence

TEL AVIV — Under disputed circumstances, the Israeli army killed five unarmed Palestinians who were crawling on their bellies before dawn Thursday toward the high barbed-wire barrier that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel.

In another incident, a Palestinian militant was shot dead by Israeli troops while trying to cut the fence surrounding a Jewish settlement in the central Gaza Strip. Ammunition, guns and hand grenades were recovered at the scene, and a Palestinian faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, claimed responsibility for the attempted infiltration early Thursday.

A seventh Palestinian, armed with an assault rifle and disguised in an Israeli army uniform, was killed Thursday evening by army troops after crossing into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, the army said.

In the volatile, violent West Bank town of Hebron, two members of Israel’s paramilitary border police, one of them a woman, were shot and killed Thursday night by Palestinian gunmen, the army said. The two were guarding a post near a disputed shrine, the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

Nearly all the Israeli troops in Hebron are men, but the border police have a few mixed units.

The shooting occurred not far from where 12 Israeli soldiers and security men from a Hebron-area settlement were killed last month in a Palestinian ambush. That attack happened along a pathway leading to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, which tradition holds is the burial site of the biblical Abraham.

The Israeli army has maintained a heavy presence in the area since the Nov. 15 attack.

Palestinians said the five men slain in Gaza, who were dragging a pair of long ladders, most likely were workers trying to scale the fence and sneak into Israel for badly needed jobs. The army suggested that even though no weapons were discovered on or near the dead men, they might have been the leading edge of an infiltration effort by an armed group to follow.

The men were spotted by Israeli soldiers using night-vision equipment at an observation post near the Karni crossing, southeast of Gaza City, the army said. Access along the fence is tightly restricted, so the group’s clandestine presence in the area in the middle of the night was automatically considered to be a threat, an army spokesman said.

Palestinians, however, pointed out that the men, whose identities were still not known by late Thursday, were killed under circumstances strikingly similar to those of three would-be workers who died earlier this year trying sneak into Israel from Gaza. No connection was ever established between those men and any Palestinian militant group, and their families eventually came forward to say the men had simply hoped to get across the fence and find work.

Unemployment in the Palestinian territories, particularly the Gaza Strip, has soared in the course of the 26-month-old intifada, with some estimates putting the jobless rate at 70% or higher. Gaza’s economy was hardly robust before the fighting began, and it is badly battered now, with most of the population sunk in poverty.

By tradition, Palestinian families are large. In conversations about their daily lives, Palestinian men in Gaza often speak of their willingness to take enormous risks to procure work to feed their families.

Before the intifada and a wave of suicide attacks against Israelis, tens of thousands of Palestinians had permission to travel daily to jobs inside Israel. The work available to them was almost always menial labor, usually on construction sites, but paid far more than the men could have made at home, if there were even jobs available.

Army spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal said soldiers guarding the Gaza fence Thursday were particularly vigilant, having received a specific intelligence warning about a potential infiltration in the area.

“So they saw a group of people crawling exactly as terrorists would do, approaching the fence,” he said. “The area is completely off limits -- no one is supposed to be there, let alone late at night, and obviously this area has seen infiltration attempts.... All the indications suggested they were doing something they should not have been doing.”

Gaza, in contrast to the West Bank, has long been fenced off from Israel to prevent militants from slipping across. A similar and much longer barrier is in the works to separate the West Bank from Israel proper.

Also Thursday, an Israeli court rejected an attempt by Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the Palestinian uprising, to win his release from detention. The court in Tel Aviv ruled that it had the right to try Barghouti, who has claimed that Israeli legal proceedings against him are illegitimate.

Barghouti, 43, who has been jailed since April, is accused of plotting attacks that killed more than two dozen Israeli civilians. He denies the charges.