Search and Destroy in Gaza

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According to an Israeli military-intelligence officer, the June 25 assault on the Kerem Shalom army post was weeks in the planning. Two days before the raid, Israeli special forces kidnapped two Hamas militants in Rafah, Gaza. After interrogating the detainees, the troops alerted military commanders that an attack was imminent. "The alert didn't include the color of the underwear of the militants," says the officer. "But it was very specific." It wasn't enough. At 5:30 a.m. on June 25, six Palestinian militants emerged from a tunnel dug 10 yds. deep and stretching from a private house on the Palestinian side of the border to the rear of the Israeli base. Two of the militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a tank carrying four Israeli soldiers, including Shalit. Two soldiers jumped from the tank and were shot dead. The militants dragged Shalit away and smuggled him through a hole cut in the fence separating Gaza and Israel. When reinforcements finally arrived, they found Shalit's bloody vest, suggesting he had been wounded in the grab.

The Israelis believe Shalit was taken to a hiding place that had been prepared in advance, probably a cellar or cave under a house in the area surrounding Rafah, a teeming city of refugee camps of some 250,000 people. Three separate groups claimed responsibility for the abduction, including the military wing of Hamas, which Israel charged was acting on the directions of Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas supremo in Damascus (see box). Two days into the Gaza incursion, Olmert ordered Israeli forces to halt their advance to allow for a mediation push by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On Friday, Mubarak claimed that Hamas had agreed to release Shalit, but Shalit's captors demanded the release of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, which Israel refused. Haniya's spokesman, Ghazi Hamad, told TIME that was the militants' demand, not the government's. "We want to avoid further escalation and end this problem very quickly." But the Israeli intelligence officer says even if a deal were brokered, the kidnappers might have gone so far underground that they would have had no way of hearing about it. Hamas' record is sobering: of the dozen soldiers it has kidnapped since 1988, all have been killed.

That, in part, explains the ardor of the Israelis' effort to find Shalit. Olmert, who took office after Ariel Sharon's stroke in January, had little choice but to go into Gaza, given the Israeli public's deep identification with the army, in which most Israeli citizens have served. Lacking any counterpart on the Palestinian side that it trusts, Israel has taken a "shake the trees" approach, putting as much pressure as possible on the government and civilian population in the hopes that someone would turn on Hamas. But it's difficult to see how some Israeli tactics, particularly the strike on the Gaza power supply, can do much other than deepen the Palestinians' misery. Already crippled by the West's financial blockade against the Hamas government, the Palestinian Authority, along with U.N. offices in Gaza, must now find a way to run sanitation systems, water supplies and hospitals with nearly half the power down--in 90° heat. "I'm not sure how depriving half the population of electricity will help Shalit get released," said Alvaro de Soto, the U.N.'s chief envoy to the Middle East. "I really can't imagine what they were thinking."