Mike Hanna: Israel's new course of action

CNN's Mike Hanna

JERUSALEM (CNN) -- After nearly a year and a half of sporadic violence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears to have reached a new, more violent stage this week -- and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has pledged a different approach in response.

From Jerusalem, CNN's Mike Hanna talked Wednesday with anchor Bill Hemmer about the latest bout of violence and possible upcoming actions by the Israeli government and military.

HEMMER: How do we define the change of course promised by Sharon?

HANNA: This conflict has been ongoing for nearly 18 months now, but it had not been waged with the intensity that has been seen over the past 24 hours. Israel has struck at numerous Palestinian targets in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

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One of the targets there was an office very close to those inhabited by Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat, who's been held in virtual house arrest in Ramallah since the beginning of December.

Also, a particular target in the course of this day has been the West Bank city of Nablus. [Israeli] tanks are reported to be on the outskirts of the city. At least 10 people are reported to have been killed in the Israeli operations there, which have involved ... tanks and very large-scale Israeli troop deployments.

And all over the last 24 hours, some 20 Palestinians have been killed -- all of this for the retaliation late [Tuesday] night for the killing of six Israeli soldiers at a roadblock in the West Bank.

Ariel Sharon has held a meeting with his security Cabinet over the course of the day. He emerged from that Cabinet meeting [with] an indication that Israeli forces and the Israeli government are considering a change of policy. Now it's not clear exactly what this means. It has not been outlined.

However, from what we are able to glean ... there is going to be a cutting back of the massive, wide-scale conventional military operations we have seen and a greater reliance on smaller scale, special forces-type operations. These would be much more pinpointed, much more narrowly focused than what we've seen in these wider scale-type actions.

But what is important within this is an implicit acknowledgment by the Sharon government that what is now in place is a guerrilla war -- one of huge scale and ongoing attrition. The Israelis seem to be acknowledging that -- after months of talking about war as a possibility -- it's now a reality that a guerrilla war is being waged on the ground.

HEMMER: On the political front, what we are hearing in the United States is the increased pressure within Sharon's own government to crank up and do something at this point. How intense are you able to gauge that pressure might be right now?

HANNA: It's very intense. And that pressure within the government, which you must remember is a coalition, is a reflection of the pressure emanating from Israeli society as a whole.

The society and the government are split along two lines. One is the camp that is saying that Sharon is not doing enough to end this confrontation. And another is a camp that is saying that Sharon is relying too much on military means to end this confrontation, and he should be making more use of political approaches.

There is this division within both Israeli society and Sharon's coalition government.