THE MIDDLE EAST: Conflicting accounts abound of what happened and why, writes Nuala Haughey in Jerusalem
As Israel's largest military operation for years in the Gaza Strip appeared to be winding down yesterday with the full withdrawal from the Rafah refugee camp last night, Palestinians came out of hiding to bury their dead while Israeli commentators began asking what it was all about.
The army said the seven-day-old offensive was crucial for stopping weapons smuggling between Egypt and Gaza's Rafah refugee camp, an impoverished community on the southern edge of the strip which is home to some 90,000 Palestinians.
The Israeli army launched Operation Rainbow early last Tuesday, less than a week after 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in ambushes in the Strip, seven close to the border in the Rafah area. It released figures last night showing that 54 Palestinians had been killed in the operation.
This makes the death toll higher than that incurred during the army incursion in the Jenin refugee camp in the north-west West Bank during a 10-day offensive in 2002, in which 52 Palestinians were killed.
In a Tel Aviv briefing last night, the army's southern front commander, Maj Gen Dan Harel, said three weapons smuggling tunnels had been discovered in the past week in the Rafah area, and they hoped to find a fourth.
While the army insists the aim of the raids and extensive house demolitions was purely to combat terrorism, critics say the motivation for the military onslaught in a civilian zone was much baser. "The IDF [Israeli Defence Forces\] operation in Rafah is not 'an operation for exposing tunnels and halting the flow of weaponry'," said columnist Ofer Shelah, writing in yesterday's mass circulation Hebrew newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.
"There are almost no tunnels in the area where the IDF has been operating for the past week. This is a strong-armed operation, intended to dull the impression - in both Israeli and Palestinian consciousness - of the attacks in which 13 Israeli soldiers were killed. In delicate language, this is 'searing the consciousness', another phrase coined by the IDF. In slightly less polite wording, this is revenge, pure and simple."
An IDF spokesman said yesterday he would not even grace this accusation with a response, yet it is one levelled by many Palestinians, particularly those in Rafah who fled their homes in the face of advancing Israeli army armoured bulldozers in recent days.
Mr Mark Heller from the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, said he did not believe the house demolitions were motivated by animus or malice, but he did not rule out what he called "indifference" to the infrastructural damage caused by the incursion.
"Force protection is the highest on the list of priorities and the lowest is the collateral damage to civilian property.
"I don't think it's intentional for the purpose of collective punishment. If collective punishment is done as a conscious policy then it has to have a purpose to intimidate or cow people into behaving differently to avoid that thing happening again. There is enough experience over the years that shows that that is not the case. It doesn't work."
However, Mr Heller still maintains that the mission has been incoherent, in part because of conflicting statements about its purpose, but also because of the lack of any durable achievement in this kind of operation.
"You can accomplish what you are doing as long as you continue, but you don't expect to be doing it forever and the question is when you stop doing it, do you have a long-term gain? It's very certain in the immediate term, but to preserve this gain you have to stay there. Some forces have already been withdrawn. There is no intention to stay there permanently.
"The other thing is establishing a conviction in the minds of the Palestinians that if this happens again Israel will come back. It remains to be seen whether the desired psychological effect will be achieved and for how long."
The timing of such an extensive operation, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is pushing for a withdrawal of troops and Jewish settlers from Gaza, also raises questions as to its political significance. Some commentators view it as an attempt by the government to show that the pull-out plan is not a victory for terrorism, particularly in the wake of the deaths of the 13 soldiers.
While the battlefront may at last be clearing, the fog of war has not yet lifted. On many occasions during Operation Rainbow, the accounts each side gave seemed to defy the reality before journalists' eyes.
On Friday, we surveyed wreckage of scores of houses which had clearly been bulldozed in the Brazil neighbourhood of the Rafah camp.
Local UN relief workers estimated that night that 40 homes were totally demolished in Brazil alone, 60 partially. There were also reports of a further 30 destroyed in the Tel Sultan neighbourhood which was under siege for most of the week.
However, an army spokesman on Friday said that only seven houses had been intentionally demolished, with collateral damage or Palestinian bombs accounting for any other damage.
Then, last night, Maj Gen Harel told journalists that 56 houses were demolished in the entire operation, still less than the estimates coming from locals and human rights groups.
Military sources said the reason for this sudden jump in the army's own figures on house demolitions was because they had since had the chance to debrief soldiers who had pulled out.
On Wednesday morning, Dr Ahmed Abu Noqaira from Rafah's Abu Yousef Al Najar Hospital told us that none of the 22 people killed in the previous 24 hours were militants. We went to the makeshift overflow morgue, a farmer's walk-in cooler normally used for storing carnations prior to sale to an Israeli company.
There we counted 14 shrouded bodies, six of them wrapped in the flags of militant groups, indicating that they had been fighters.
The army said its troops killed 40 militants and at least seven civilians. However the total civilian death toll was 14, at least two of whom the army claim were killed by Palestinian gunmen during fighting.
Palestinians said a total of 42 were killed in the operation, including both civilians and militants.
And so it continues, parallel realities battling on in the war for public support that is always an intrinsic part of the conflict.