1. Al-Atamna

Foreign visitors to the Gaza Strip are well acquainted with the band of taxi drivers who work at the entrance to the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing point. This is a permanent group, a kind of closed guild, which is entitled to work there because of the fact that the Shin Bet security services do not suspect its members of terrorist activity. Most of them speak Hebrew, because in the past they worked in Israel or thanks to their close work with Israeli journalists. A few of them know how to recite Jewish prayers by heart. Most of them are inhabitants of the northern Gaza Strip, and this week the long arm of the Israel Defense Forces reached into their homes as well.

It started with A., the regular driver for the Haaretz team, who lives in Beit Hanun. Several tanks parked at the entrance to his home during the days of Operation Autumn Clouds. Like other families in the small town, his family had to cope with the acute shortage of water, food and electricity during the course of the action. On the fifth day of the operation, A. was arrested, not because he had been involved in terror attacks or the firing of Qassam rockets, but because he is an adult male. The Israel Defense Forces arrested for questioning all of the town's adult males. A. was relatively lucky; he was released in less than 24 hours.

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Raad al-Atamna, one of his cabbie colleagues, had a far worse week. Raad lived with his wife and children in the home of his extended family in the Hamad neighborhood, which is on the western edge of Beit Hanun. Early on Wednesday morning he set out for work. A few minutes later, when he was at the entrance to Gaza, his mobile phone rang. His brother Wael informed him that the family home had been bombarded and there were many people injured there; he asked him to call for first aid.

Raad drove back to the house in a frenzy. "You don't understand. It's impossible to forget this sight," he says. "Children without hands, without feet, flung in every corner, tremendous destruction. Our whole family lives there. The stairwell was completely destroyed and in every corner there was someone who was wounded or killed. Blood was everywhere and amputated limbs. Even our neighbors, who came to help, were wounded by the last shells."

According to him, the house was hit by at least seven shells. "I don't know what to tell you. We have five children in the family who are seriously wounded and it is not clear to me whether they will survive the night. My children, praise God, are alive. But I have sent them to friends, because we don't have anywhere to sleep. In the meantime I'll sleep at the neighbors' house."

Raad, who works regularly with Israeli journalists, finds it hard to understand the bombardment. "There wasn't any problem with Israel in our family. Ever. But even if there had been anything like that, how is a 4-year-old little boy or little girl to blame; how is a 7-year-old girl whose foot was amputated to blame?"

The Al-Atamna family lost 17 members, who were buried yesterday afternoon. The other two people killed belonged to a different family. Those who remained alive now have to find a place to erect their mourning pavilion, which will join the dozens of pavilions scattered around the town.

The damage that the action left in Beit Hanun is considerable. From the Nasser Mosque, where the wanted men hid, only the minaret remains standing, after IDF bulldozers knocked down some of its external walls. The water and telephone infrastructure has been damaged, as have hundreds of cars and homes. To visitors from the outside, it seems as though during the days of the operation, the IDF tried to exact a price, along the lines of Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank in 2002, to make it clear to the inhabitants what the consequences of an Israeli occupation are liable to be.

In the meantime, it appears that the Palestinians have drawn an entirely different conclusion. "We will avenge our children's blood even if we die," says an inhabitant who was lightly wounded in the bombardment. "If our children are do not take revenge, our grandchildren will."

2. Galant

And these are the chronicles of playing with fire in gaza. Ariel Sharon pressed to begin artillery fire into the Gaza Strip, Shaul Mofaz agreed, and Dan Harel (then GOC Southern Command and an artilleryman by profession) blocked it with all his might.

After the disengagement, Harel went to the United States to serve as military attache in Washington. His replacement, Yoav Galant, bowed to the will of the party. Aviv Kochavi, the commander of the division, proposed the method and constructed the circuitous operational rationale: The firing is in any case into "open areas." The danger to civilian lives is not great and the shells deter the Qassam cells from going back to their familiar launch sites, in a way that decreases the rockets' precision.

Last summer Kochavi, too, went to America, to study. His replacement, Moshe (Chico) Tamir, in fact reconsidered and even very much reduced the firing, but in the end he allowed the use of bombardments, as a last resort. On Wednesday, on his watch, 19 civilians were killed.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who could have averted this horror if he had only been more determined in face of his generals, did not do a thing. Now he is apologizing to the Palestinians and extending them a hand in peace.

All the early signs were there, had anyone bothered to look at them. Between February and May of this year, approximately 10 Palestinians were killed by Israeli artillery fire in the northern Gaza Strip. A little girl here, two adolescents on the way to school there, and somewhere else youngsters who were playing soccer. When thousands of artillery shells are fired into such a small area, the results are predictable. When reports came in from the Palestinian side, the IDF reply was "not familiar with it, don't know."

Every time journalists asked for clarifications, the spokesmen replied that the circumstances were still being examined. "The battery's radar in fact showed a precise hit," they claimed. "The Palestinian report is not in accord with the times of shooting that are known to us." The frequent inconsistencies in the Palestinian testimonies enabled the army to evade responsibility and the vagueness remained in effect. Since it was a matter of one or two killed each time, and not a mass killing, the firing of the artillery shells continued.

Activists in a number of human rights organizations who read in Haaretz that the safety range for firing in the proximity of houses had been to reduced to 100 meters, compared to the range of one kilometer that had prevailed in the past on the northern border, petitioned the High Court of Justice last April. The IDF complied and increased the range, and the deliberations on the petition in the High Court of Justice fizzled. After that the Lebanon War broke out, and no one was thinking about what was happening in Gaza.

The killing on Wednesday in Beit Hanun was tantamount to an accident just waiting to happen. The investigative team headed by Major General Meir Khalifi, asked to submit its conclusions by Thursday evening, focused on two possibilities: human error or a glitch in either the battery's radar or its firing computer.

But the technical explanation is less important. The common Israeli reaction in such cases is fear of "what the world will say." The photos from Beit Hanun are apparently really not the best gift the prime minister can take along to Washington, but the U.S. Administration is in any case busy with other things at the moment.

To calm things down in Gaza, the United States will apparently ask Israel to do something for the sake of the population. Implementing the Dayton plan for opening the crossing points, despite the reservations on the part of the IDF and the Shin Bet, will apparently be considered suitable compensation.

The bombardment of Beit Hanun came on the day after the end of the ground operation in the town, which the IDF described as successful. In both of them, and in a number of aerial attacks during that same week, nearly 80 people were killed, nearly half of them civilians. The Qassams, of course, are continuing to fall.

Major General Galant and Brigadier General Tamir intended Autumn Clouds to serve as a kind of war game in preparation for the large action they want, in order to prove that the IDF can act successfully in a crowded urban area in the Gaza Strip and warn the Palestinians that their continued armament through the tunnels will bring the army back in, deeply. The balance of the last week shows that it will be very difficult to fight in the heart of a civilian population without causing similar damage. It will also be difficult to persuade the government, the Israeli public and certainly world public opinion that such killing is justified in light of the threat to Sderot.

Galant - to whose credit it must be said that he appeared in person on Wednesday before the cameras and did not hasten to pass the blame downward, as has been common of late in the IDF - knows all this. He is grappling with real constraints. Eventually, a fatal Qassam will fall on Sderot. The smuggling continues. Every month, a shipment of regulation explosives and hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles has gone through. Experts on explosives and fighting, graduates of Hezbollah camps, come and go via Egypt unhindered. And with the government blaming the IDF for spoiling the broth, it is also worth asking what the prime minister and the defense minister have done to supervise the activity, and whether they have at all advanced the possibility of a diplomatic horizon, which would reduce the chances of terror igniting.

Blood does not turn to water, said Hamas policy bureau head Khaled Mashal yesterday in Damascus. Hamas, despite the clear danger to the life of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, sounded determined to avenge the blood of those who were killed in Beit Hanun. The IDF and the the Shin Bet have gone on record alert to avert the evil. This might work for a few days, and when the terror attack finally comes, Israel will find in it justification for a new major action in the Gaza Strip. From there it will be but a short way to the entrance of forces into Gaza, the next fatal mistake, the forced withdrawal under international pressure and more Qassams on Sderot, and so on and so forth.

3. Mashal

On Wednesday Ismail Haniyeh and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) reported to the hospital in Gaza to donate blood for the wounded. This manifestation of brotherhood was aimed at compensating for Haniyeh's decision to suspend the talks on a unity government. Two days earlier, Haniyeh had informed Abbas that current Health Minister Bassem al-Naim was his candidate for the post of prime minister in a new government. Haniyeh, who will be the first to be deposed if a government of technocrats is formed, proposed Naim's name knowing that Abbas would respond in the negative, but he hoped that the negotiations on the issue would afford him another few days in the position before he would be required to leave.

All this was the case until the bombardment in Beit Hanun. The Hamas has been the big winner of the week. No one will dare demand Haniyeh's dismissal now. At most, there will be a call for unity to deal with Israel. Even if Hamas does move to establish a government of technocrats, it will be on its own terms and not in submission to dictates from Abbas. The public supports the organization.

Like Haniyeh, Khaled Mashal has understood the profit inherent in the developments in the Gaza Strip. He called a press conference yesterday in Damascus, immediately after the joint appearance by Haniyeh and Abbas in Gaza. Mashal, closely shorn, set forth his arguments. He identifies with the sorrow of the families of those who were killed, he said, and feels the pain of the inhabitants of Beit Hanun.

Mashal is commanding from Damascus the continuation of the jihad, until the last drop of blood, of course. He will not hear the Israeli artillery shells landing close to him, or the screams of the Palestinians who are hit by IDF fire. The leader in exile called upon the international community to establish a war crimes court that will investigate the killing in Beit Hanun. An interesting demand, coming from the mouth of a man who approved, inter alia, the terror attacks at the Dolphinarium and the Park Hotel.