There's much more that needs to be said about this situation; with specific finger-pointing for the deserving organizations and individuals. We've done some of this difficult analysis and reporting in the past; there's much more necessary now.

GAZA (Reuters) - 21 February: Israeli warships fired at Palestinian security compounds along the Gaza Strip coastline and tanks rumbled into areas in southern and eastern Gaza on Thursday in a three-pronged night-time assault.

For a second day in a row, Israel helicopters launched missiles at Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's West Bank headquarters, missing the Palestinian leader who aides said was in his office at the time but was unscathed.

A defiant Arafat said after the attack, which he described as "Israeli rudeness": This is an attempt to make the Palestinian people and its leadership kneel, but they don't know that this people and their leadership are the mighty people."

The missile strike signaled the depths of Israeli fury after Palestinians killed six soldiers in a West Bank ambush on Tuesday, the latest in a wave of heightened attacks on Israelis which included a suicide bombing that killed two teenagers.

In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian doctors said five people, one a gunman, another a 37-year-old civilian and the rest not yet identified, had been killed and around 40 people wounded in the Israeli raids, which began shortly after midnight.

After the raids ended, an Israeli warplane fired three missiles at a Palestinian security building in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, Palestinian officials said.

The attacks were part of a stepped-up response by Israel's government which ordered more ferocious and varied retaliatory strikes against the Palestinians Wednesday. Since the fierce Israeli sea, air and land strikes began, 21 Palestinians have been killed.

The Israeli bombardments of Palestinian security installations were among the heaviest since an uprising against occupation began in September 2000. The violence has raised international concern the conflict could spiral out of control.

The United States put most of the blame for the spiraling violence on Arafat, who it said had "not yet taken adequate action." But the State Department also said the Israeli air strikes worked against the "objective of reducing the violence."

In New York, the Palestinians demanded late Wednesday an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council to condemn Israeli bombardments.

Diplomats said they planned private consultations on Thursday on the request backed by Yemen, the current head of the Arab group at the United Nations, as well as Syria, the only Arab nation on the 15-member council.

The night silence along Gaza's Mediterranean coast was broken as naval gunships traded machinegun fire with Palestinian security compounds and 10 tanks rumbled into a southern Gaza refugee camp shortly after midnight.

Seven tanks and several armored personnel carriers raided another Palestinian-ruled town, east of Gaza City where they later blew up the Voice of Palestine headquarters, knocking radio and television transmissions off the air.

Israel has accused the Palestinian Authority-run Voice of Palestine of inciting violence, a charge Palestinians deny.

Loudspeakers on mosques called for Palestinians with weapons to confront Israeli forces and fierce fighting erupted throughout the Gaza Strip, lasting for about three hours until the naval ships and troops pulled back.

The Gaza strikes followed a meeting with key cabinet members Wednesday, in which political sources said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon approved an increase in the scale and variety of military reprisals.

"We are in a war, a war that had been launched against us by the coalition of terror that has been established by Chairman Arafat after choosing a strategy of terror," Sharon later told American-Jewish leaders.

Israel has said it has no intention of personally harming the Palestinian leader. The strikes were the closest Israel has come to hurting Arafat in a conflict which international mediation has failed to curb.

Frightened Rafah residents grabbed their children and fled deeper into Palestinian-ruled territory as the tanks plunged about 700 meters (yards) deep into the Brazil refugee camp from the Israeli-controlled Gaza-Egypt border.

Israeli bulldozers destroyed a Palestinian police position in Rafah and troops took over the rooftops of several buildings in the refugee camp, a Palestinian security official said.

Earlier, Israeli warplanes destroyed a Palestinian security building with a missile during an air attack on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Jenin. No one was hurt.

Most of the 21 killed were members of the security forces, but at least five civilians have died. A leader of Hamas's military-wing in Gaza and another Hamas activist were also killed.

Thirty-five Palestinians, including two suicide bombers, and 10 Israelis have died in the surge of violence since Monday.

At least 884 Palestinians and 273 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian revolt began after peace talks froze.

[The Guardian Monday February 18, 2002]: A devastating wave of Palestinian attacks on the symbols of Israeli military occupation - a Jewish settlement, an army base and a road block - struck Israel to its core this weekend, badly shaking its faith in the warrior prime minister, Ariel Sharon. In the Jewish settlement of Karnei Shomron yesterday, sobbing girls linked arms and quietly sang at a vigil for two teenagers blown up by a suicide bomber. But the adults of this West Bank outpost were overcome by anger - much of it directed against Mr Sharon, who they say has failed to live up to his 50-year legacy of crushing Israel's Arab enemies.

"As of right now, what I see from the results is that this man has failed," said Bob Duchanov, a builder from New York who has lived in Karnei Shomron for 17 years. "There is no security in the country."

As if on cue, three hours later came another suicide bombing which, though thwarted, deepened a feeling of unease amid a spate of attacks that have killed seven Israelis since Thursday night.

"Ariel Sharon's strategy is collapsing," said the Ma'ariv newspaper. "At this stage, as difficult as it may be to say so openly, the Palestinians are losing the battles to a superior force, but Israel is losing the war."

In Ma'ariv's weekend opinion polls, some 49% of Israelis agreed, saying the "national leadership has lost control of the security situation".

However, 44% disagreed, reflecting what the paper's political analyst, Hemi Shalev, called "steadily growing confusion" as Mr Sharon fails to deliver a political or a military solution to 17 months of bloodshed.

Three policemen were injured in yesterday's foiled bombing of an army base in Pardes Hanna. Two Palestinians - the bomber, who blew himself up after a police chase, and another man - were also killed.

The two suicide attacks follow the killing of an Israeli soldier at a roadblock near Ramallah on Friday night.

The attacks suggest new levels of sophistication by Palestinian militants, targeting soldiers and Jewish settlements - which are considered illegal under international law - rather than civilians in Israeli cities in an apparent attempt to mute international criticism.

Saturday night's attack was also a double first: the first time a suicide bomber has penetrated a heavily guarded Jewish settlement, and the first time the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has used a suicide bomber, usually the preserve of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The force of the explosion embedded nails in walls 25 metres from the pizza counter where a house painter from the West Bank town of Qalqiliya - himself a teenager of 18 - blew himself up, shattering the windows in seven nearby shops and killing Keren Shatsky, aged 14, and Nehemiah Amar, 16. The mall, built less than a year ago, is a magnet for teenagers: Keren was waiting for her mates after planning a surprise birthday party for a friend. In destroying such innocent pleasures, Palestinian militants magnified doubts about Mr Sharon's strategy for dealing with the uprising, which includes assassinations, tank invasions of the West Bank and Gaza, and the bombing of Palestinian security installations by F-16 warplanes.

Israeli helicopters fired missiles on security installations in the West Bank city of Nablus early yesterday, and tanks roared into the el-Buriej refugee camp in Gaza on Saturday, killing three Palestinian police. In the West Bank city of Jenin, a Hamas commander was blown up by a car bomb.

For the adults of Karnei Shomron, it was not enough. "After more than a year of this, we should have been able to see results," said Yitzhak Shwartz, whose photography shop was gutted by the blast. "Sharon has no plan. The job of this government is to defend its citizens and it is not doing that. It doesn't solve our problems to blow up empty buildings. It does not do anything."

For many here, there was a disturbing synchronicity to events. As Keren Shatsky waited for her friends at Karnei Shomron, barely an hour's drive away in Tel Aviv the Israeli left was mustering for a peace demonstration.

The turnout by past standards was hardly impressive - charitably placed at 5,000 people - but it was the largest since the start of the Palestinian uprising, and a sign of the growing radicalisation of the Israeli left as well as the right.

Opinion polls at the weekend showed 35% of Israelis support what is coyly known here as "transfer" - the wholesale expulsion of the Palestinians - and there is a growing clamour to re-invade and re-occupy the entirety of the territories.

"Let them go into every single Arab city and make the 90% of them who are good point out the 10% of them who are rotten apples, and get rid of all the rotten apples," said Mr Duchanov. "Forget what the world says - let's do what has to be done."

[The Independent, UK, 16 February 2002]: Israel's armed forces have suffered one of their most disastrous 24-hour periods since the start of the Palestinian intifada, with a devastating guerrilla attack on one of their main battle tanks and the death of the commander of an elite undercover unit, possibly killed by his own army's demolition work.

The army launched an inquiry yesterday into how a large mine managed to destroy a heavily armoured and highly sophisticated Merkava-3 tank, billed as one of the safest fighting machines in the world. Three of the crew were killed, and a fourth was injured in the attack inside the Gaza Strip. As the army contemplated the possibility of flaws in its standard work-horse tank, it was hit by another disaster - the death of the commander of a "Duvdevan" unit during a pre-dawn raid in the West Bank.

Reports said that 34-year-old Lt-Col Eyal Weiss was killed when a wall collapsed on him while military bulldozers were knocking down an adjoining house used by a suspected Islamic Jihad leader, whom the unit had arrested in the village of Saida. This, too, will be the subject of a military inquiry. The attack on the tank was treated as highly sensitive by Israel, prompting government censors yesterday to impose a ban on the publication of photographs showing the wreckage on the grounds that it would "damage the security of the state".

The Palestinians have never before destroyed any of the many scores of Merkava tanks which have been operating in the occupied territories during the conflict. The blast blew off the tank's turret.

A diplomatic source said: "It's the first time that a tank has been badly damaged like this, and it's changed the rules entirely."

The bombing, on Thursday night, happened close to a road controlled by the Israeli army between Gaza's Karni crossing and Netzarim, a little-populated Israeli settlement inside the strip. The army has torn up orchards and palm groves on much of the surrounding landscape to prevent such attacks. Yesterday Israeli tanks and bulldozers demolished homes and other buildings near the scene.

An Israeli Defence Forces spokesman, Lt-Col Olivier Rafowich, said it was a "carefully planned operation" against "the best we have". According to the army, the mine comprised about 50kg of explosives. It was a double ambush - one bomb set off to lure the armoured vehicle to the scene for a much bigger second blast.

The Israeli media presented the attack as a defining moment in the conflict.

The Jerusalem Post newspaper said: "The tank's reputation for invincibility has now been shattered and makes the conflict appear even more like Lebanon."

The attack is the latest in a series of problems faced by the army which include a revolt by more than 220 reservists who have signed a petition refusing to serve in the occupied territories.

Responsibility for the tank attack was claimed by the Popular Resistance Committee, a coalition of Palestinian groups fighting the intifada, including Hamas and Fatah. It issued a leaflet saying the attack was in answer to Israel's killing of five Palestinians during a large-scale raid on Gaza this week. A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Ismael Abu Shanab, was triumphant. "The operation is an appropriate response to the invasion by Israeli tanks into Palestinian areas.

"It is a change in the balance of forces in favour of the Palestinian resistance," he told The Independent.