News Analysis; Dramatic Increase in Gaza Violence Amid Frustration with Peace Process

Hardly a day passes now without Palestinians dying in the administered territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The intifada, now more than five years old, has experienced a dramatic increase in violence during the last few months. And Israel’s grip on the territories — particularly the Gaza Strip–has gotten weaker.

For the time being, the controversy over the deported Palestinians now in southern Lebanon and efforts to resume the peace talks have pushed Gaza into the background of the peace talks.

But even though Gaza seems to have faded from the top of the peace agenda, conditions on the ground continue to deteriorate.

These are the grim facts that Israelis are confronting after a bloody four days in which 10 Palestinians were shot to death by Israeli troops. The Palestinian deaths between Friday and Monday were the highest four-day toll in two years.

Capping the violence on Tuesday, an Israeli civilian was shot to death in the Gaza Strip.

TWENTY PERCENT RISE IN FATALITIES

The B’tselem human rights association reported this week an increase of 20 percent in the number of fatalities in the territories in the first six months of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government as compared with the last six months of Yitzhak Shamir’s government.

In the last six months under Shamir, 63 Palestinians were killed, as compared with 76 in the first half-year under Rabin, the report said.

B’tselem also pointed out that a greater number of children were being killed under Rabin’s regime, a further sign of deterioration in the territories.

Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak disputed B’tselem’s report, saying the group’s figures were higher than army figures. He noted, however, that the army did not include in its statistics wanted Palestinians shot by soldiers in pursuit.

In response to the recent killings, Israeli ministers from the left-wing Meretz party complained about the rising number of fatalities and demanded at a Cabinet meeting Sunday that the army make efforts to reduce the number of deaths.

Rabin insisted that there was no change in the standing orders to soldiers about when and how to open fire, but Minister of the Environment Yossi Sarid noted that even if the orders are the same, the situation in the field is not–and thus a re-evaluation was warranted.

The truth of the matter is that both Rabin and Sarid are right. The standing orders may not have changed, but the situation certainly has.

The stalemate in the peace process and the growing power of the anti-peace camp in the Palestinian society — led by the Moslem fundamentalist Hamas movement — have reignited the intifada, which last year seemed paralyzed.

It is a more violent intifada, with armed gangs roaming almost freely in the remote neighborhoods of Gaza City, the dense refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, and the windy alleys of the Nablus casbah.

Armed gangs have left stone-throwing for the kids and are now using guns and rifles which they have managed to collect in the past five years.

The gangs have frequently turned the guns against their own people, murdering fellow Arabs on suspicion of collaboration with the Israeli authorities. And in recent months, the armed nationalist cells have increasingly turned their guns against the army, in a series of daring commando attacks.

Regular army patrols in the heart of Arab cities and refugee camps, let alone remote villages, have been cut to a minimum.

However, in the fight against guerrilla warfare there has been no choice but to use anti-guerrilla tactics. This has meant a larger emphasis on intelligence work, and counter-terrorist operations, mostly by undercover units.

The army’s new tactic has been to avoid confronting mass demonstrations and concentrate instead on hitting the hard-core elements of Palestinian resistance, preferably in their own bases and before damage is caused.

On top of everything, there is a growing hesitancy of regular soldiers to serve in the territories as a result of the increasingly daring attacks and sophisticated ambushes by Palestinians on army vehicles and patrols.

As Palestinian attacks become more bold and frequent, soldiers take fewer chances. They shoot whenever their life is endangered — or whenever they think their life is endangered.

The shooting incident last weekend at the entrance to the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip was a case in point.

An officer at an army roadblock spotted rifles sticking out of an approaching car. He ordered soldiers to open fire, killing three gunmen and capturing two others.

It was a situation requiring split-second decisions. Had the officer make a mistake identifying the car, two innocent Palestinians would have been killed.

Strict limitations for security reasons on Gaza residents working in Israel has reduced the daily number of laborers crossing into Israel proper from 100,000 in the past to between 30,000 and 35,000 currently.

This has only added to growing unemployment and thus increased frustration in Gaza. The unemployed find themselves on the streets — and their obvious target of rage is the army.

The difficult situation in the Gaza Strip raises a delicate question: how much longer can this go on?

In the 1980s, Shimon Peres, now foreign minister, was the champion of the “Gaza First” option, which suggested that the problem of the Gaza Strip should be put first on the agenda of the autonomy talks.

But the idea seems to have been put on the back-burner in the present government.

Although Israel — and perhaps even some of its Arab interlocutors — might wish Gaza would disappear, the Strip and its 750,000 residents won’t fade away that easily.