GAZA STRIP, Feb 20: After an unprecedented five hours of Israeli air and sea raids in Gaza City and a sleepless night, Palestinian policemen, security forces and people on the streets were still in shock on Wednesday.

The Ansar compound, also known as Palestinian leader Yasser’s Arafat’s security compound and a former Israeli jail turned into a training base for various branches of the Palestinian security and naval forces, was a pile of rubble.

Yet it was difficult to distinguish which Israeli strike had caused what damage.

The compound has been repeatedly hit since the beginning of the intifada in Sept 2000 and security personnel and onlookers had trouble grasping Israel’s stubbornness in striking the same targets over and over again.

“We had no idea they would strike,” a worn-out security official said.

Early on Wednesday morning, however, Israeli warships for the first time hit Arafat’s Gaza offices, across the street from the Ansar compound, with Palestinian security officials reporting an attempted beach assault by Israeli marines on the building.

Four of Arafat’s personal guards died there and were buried amid a crowd of thousands on Wednesday noon in an official military ceremony attended by civilian and military dignitaries.

Minutes after the first strike, an F-16 fighter-bomber blasted Gaza City police headquarters and Apache helicopters launched five hours of strikes.

They fired 20 missiles at targets across the Mediterranean city, including a civilian building quartering policemen and Arafat’s heliport, which was hit in December.

Arafat was not in the building — he has been confined to the West Bank town of Ramallah since Dec 3, when Israeli helicopters destroyed his helicopters in his Gaza City compound.

The attack took place after Palestinian guerillas killed six Israeli soldiers and injured another at an army checkpoint near the village of Ein Arik, west of Ramallah on the West Bank.

At the Gaza City police headquarters, hit once already last December, a disheartened policeman said: “This is a psychological war as much as one causing destruction. When Israelis see casualties inflicted upon them, they want revenge.”

He said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “gives them just that by bombing the hell out of us, but what Israelis don’t see on television is that it is the same old places that are bombed continuously”, he added.

“And what they don’t see either is that the bombings take place in the midst of civilian areas and cause collateral damage,” he said.

The policemen pointed to a school, belonging to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees — UNWRA — behind the police headquarters whose windows had exploded from the missile’s blast.

Half of an F-16 missile was also found in the school’s courtyard on Wednesday morning and removed to be detonated in a safe place, Palestinian security sources said.

UNWRA’s head Peter Hansen condemned the Israeli strikes and said “there is only a political solution to this conflict, no military one”. He said the school would be temporarily closed for “security reasons” and also owing to the damage that had to be fixed.—AFP