Israel arrested 52 Islamic Jihad activists overnight in its first big crackdown against militants since a February ceasefire, a sharp policy change that clouded a meeting yesterday between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
The sweep followed a rash of deadly attacks by the militant group on Israeli targets in recent days. The spike in violence has threatened recent efforts to coordinate Israel's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip with the Palestinians, and stoked fears that a renewed chance for peacemaking might be lost.
After Palestinian militants declared an informal ceasefire early this year, Israel agreed to go after only those on the brink of carrying out attacks.
But with Islamic Jihad stepping up its activities this week, killing two Israelis, the military decided it will no longer limit its operations to "ticking bombs," but will go after anyone affiliated with the group, said Lieutenant Colonel Erez Winner, a commander in the West Bank.
"We operated against this group in a restrained manner," he said, both to preserve the calm and because many members of Islamic Jihad were hiding in Tulkarem, a West Bank town that Israeli handed over to Palestinian police as part of the ceasefire.
But "Islamic Jihad has taken itself absolutely out of the [ceasefire] agreement with its attacks, and so from our view, we are operating fully against them, as we did before," Winner said. "Anyone we know who is affiliated with this organization is a legitimate target."
He said he didn't foresee more mass arrests, because the overnight sweep netted many of the militants Israel has been watching.
Khadr Adnan, an Islamic Jihad spokesman in the West Bank, said if the Palestinian Authority and Egypt, which brokered the ceasefire declaration, don't take action to ensure Israeli commitment to the truce, "then we will consider ourselves to be outside [it], and will call upon all Palestinian factions to do the same."
Islamic Jihad is the smaller of the two main militant groups in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. In addition to this week's violence, the group carried out the deadliest single attack since the truce declaration, a Feb. 25 bombing of a Tel Aviv nightclub that killed five Israelis.
The larger militant group, Hamas, has been relatively quiet as it tries to cement a political following ahead of Palestinian legislative elections later this year.
Israel has been very critical of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' strategy for reining in extremists, which favors persuasion over confrontation. At their meeting yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was expected to demand that Abbas clamp down on militants. Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said the Palestinian attacks and Israeli arrests endangered the ceasefire, and "have really cast a dark cloud over the summit."
"I want to condemn the cycle of violence that preceded the anticipated summit today," Erekat said. "The Israeli arrests this morning will not add anything to sustaining the quiet."
Erekat said Abbas and Sharon would discuss security issues, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and four northern West Bank settlements, and Israel's promise, made under the ceasefire, to withdraw from West Bank towns. The meeting follows a visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region just a few days ago. In Washington, US officials called on Abbas to take action against militants.
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