Quotes of the Day

The truth of a murderous conflict often gets buried in the rubble of confusion, error and propaganda. Certainly that's what happened in Rafah, the Palestinian refugee camp at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, after four Israeli infantry battalions and nearly 40 tanks roared in last week. After more than a dozen homes had been destroyed, thousands of Palestinians gathered for angry demonstrations. To disperse the protesters, an Israeli tank fired a shell at an empty building, but the shell blasted shrapnel toward the crowd, killing seven. That set off a chorus of outrage and accusations of massacre that obscured the roots of the tragedy: a warren of crude but efficient tunnels 20 m beneath the ground that run from Rafah, under a border heavily guarded by Israel, into Egypt.

The tunnels, many of them no wider than a man's shoulders but up to 300 m long, have existed since Israel's 1981 peace deal with Egypt put the border slap through Rafah. Some Rafah clans have developed an expertise in burrowing that keeps illegal profits within the family. The tunnels' original purpose was purely commercial: smugglers used them to supply the Gaza Strip with cheap cigarettes, alcohol and baby formula. But in times of intifadeh, they are a conduit for much deadlier contraband: guns, ammunition, explosives. The massive Israeli incursion into Rafah last week was intended to break the arms-smuggling ring. Both Israeli and Palestinian security officials say the high-quality explosives that killed six Israeli soldiers in Gaza City earlier this month had been brought in through the tunnels.

But the Israeli operation, incongruously code-named Rainbow, was a failure. It brought fresh tragedy upon the Palestinians, lengthening the list of the intifadeh's martyrs. And it didn't close off the tunnels. Some military officials tell TIME the intelligence extracted from arrested Palestinians has been poor and hasn't led to any tunnel finds. Now, the officials say, in addition to international condemnation they face the prospect of yet more powerful weapons that will come at them out of the ground in Rafah. "We are afraid things will climb a step that will change the whole balance," says an official with the Shin Bet security service.

The tunnels are dug from the cover of cinder-block tenements in the Shabourah Refugee Camp, so Operation Rainbow required the demolition of these buildings, widening to 300 m the buffer zone between Rafah and the border. The camp, founded in 1949 and home to 90,000 Palestinians, used to extend right up to the border. Amnesty International says almost 1,000 homes have been destroyed during the intifadeh as Israel has gradually increased the distance the smugglers must dig to traverse the border. Israeli military officials tell TIME they want a 1-km buffer zone, which would require the destruction of hundreds more homes.

But last Wednesday the operation's purpose was overshadowed by what Palestinians say was a deliberate strike against protesting civilians, and Israelis claim was a mistaken attempt to hold demonstrators at bay. As several hundred approached Israeli positions in Tel Sultan, a housing project at the edge of the refugee camp, a tank opened up with its 0.50-caliber heavy machine gun. The tank shot three bursts at a building about 50 m away from the demonstrators. After each burst, the Palestinians retreated and then came back. The Israelis say — and some Palestinian eyewitnesses confirm — that among the crowd were a number of armed men, which is why Israeli commanders were determined to keep the demonstrators away from the tanks and some exposed infantrymen. An Apache helicopter hovering above Rafah fired a missile into open ground near the demonstrators, but still they didn't turn.

At this point, an Israeli lieutenant-colonel, commander of tank Battalion 74, radioed his brigade commander from a nearby Merka-va tank, seeking permission to fire a few warning shells. (Since tank shells killed demonstrators in the West Bank earlier in the intifadeh, the Israeli army has banned the practice of firing them to deter demonstrators, unless a senior officer accepts that no other method will stop a mob.) The brigade commander gave his approval. Soon after 3:30 p.m., a Battalion 74 tank fired four shells into the same empty building that earlier took the heavy machine-gun rounds. But shrapnel from one of the shells sprayed the crowd. The Palestinians fled, carrying dozens of the injured. No one knew where the explosion had come from, and many suspected it had been a missile fired directly into the crowd from a helicopter. When it was over, seven Palestinians, four of them children, were dead.

Palestinian leaders cast the attack as a new slaughter on the scale of the 2002 battle in the refugee camp at Jenin, when 54 Palestinian gunmen and civilians died. Initial Palestinian claims of 26 dead in Rafah were scaled back when some of those named among the dead were shown to have been killed the week before. But that didn't stop Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from describing the incident as a "massacre."

Aides to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon say he is convinced that leaving the Rafah tunnels intact would lead to more casualties among Israeli soldiers. Sources in Islamic militant groups in Rafah tell TIME that much of the weaponry and explosives that has passed through the tunnels in recent months is supplied by Hizballah, the Lebanese Shi'ite militia, and arrives in Egypt via African countries where Hizballah has a network among Lebanese émigrés. (Israeli intelligence officials claim Sudan has become a major source of matériel.) Israeli military officials note that recent attacks on their troops were carried out with high-quality, factory-made explosives, rather than the usual crude devices homemade in Gaza. They believe that Palestinian groups are trying to ferry quantities of more powerful plastic explosives through the tunnels, and fear the tunnels could be used to import Russian-made Katyusha missiles with a range of more than 20 km. Fired from Gaza, these would be able tÿo hit the Israeli city of Ashkelon.

In a macabre twist, the failure of Operation Rainbow breathed some life back into Sharon's plan to evacuate Israel's troops and 7,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip. His Likud party rejected that plan on May 2, but Sharon said last week that he'll bring a revised, more gradual version for Cabinet approval next week. In two weeks of Gaza violence, Israel's public opinion turned even more sharply in support of Sharon's withdrawal plan, with polls showing over 80% in favor. Whatever its shape, the new plan will likely leave Israeli soldiers along the border with Egypt by Rafah — with the tunnels running under their feet.

• MATT REES | Jerusalem
• How Israel's incursion in the Rafah refugee camp ended in tragedy