Jerrold Kessel: Israel calls up reservists

CNN's Jerrold Kessel

(CNN) -- Israel began calling up reservists Sunday to fortify its efforts to stem the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings, which continued last week with two attacks in Jerusalem.

As part of that operation, Israeli forces -- with the backing of the country's security Cabinet -- have been moving back into Palestinian towns and cities in the West Bank, carrying out searches and arresting terror suspects.

CNN Correspondent Jerrold Kessel reported on the flurry of words and action Sunday.

KESSEL: Israeli troops are indeed inside Palestinian towns and entrenching, it seems, in at least four West Bank cities. This is the latest move that Israel is taking to offset, to try to forestall, to try to hamper the activities of the Palestinian suicide bombers who have wreaked such death and destruction in the latest round of the Palestinian bombing campaign inside Israeli cities and inside the West Bank. ...

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As the Israeli Cabinet met [Sunday] morning, there are also discussions going on, we understand from Israeli security sources, of the possibility of Israel extending this campaign to try to thwart the bombers, possibly by imposing deportation orders or expulsion of leading Palestinians believed to be heads of militant organizations -- either from the whole region or from the West Bank into Gaza, where Israel has a security fence around Gaza and believes it could contain the militants more effectively.

The Israelis say all this action -- as Prime Minister [Ariel] Sharon discussed it with his Cabinet [on Sunday] morning -- has become inevitable because of the spate of suicide bombings, which has not been stemmed as a result of that monthlong Israeli offensive into the West Bank during April and into May. The suicide bombers have been coming back with a vengeance.

Palestinians see it entirely differently. They say that this Israeli reoccupation of their towns is really aimed at something that was on the Sharon government's agenda all along. The Israeli government and Ariel Sharon, say Palestinians, want simply to reimpose a total occupation of the West Bank and to do away with the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat.

All now [are] looking to the United States as the situation continues to escalate -- or to deteriorate.

CNN: The Sharon government denies that all of this effort is an attempt to redraw the political boundaries. They say they're security boundaries. Is that a difference without a distinction?

KESSEL: It's a difficult one to call because the Israelis do have the evidence of the suicide bombings that have kept on coming -- the suicide bombers have kept on coming -- and which [the Israelis] have been hard put to stop. And all that five-week offensive, they said at the time -- the Israeli military said -- well, at least for several months, they believed, they would have the terror organizations on the [run] and they wouldn't be able to send the bombers out.

It's just six weeks or so since they ended that Defensive Shield, as it was called, the operation. And the bombers have come back. And the Israelis are now of the opinion, all along the line -- even on the left wing of the Israeli political spectrum, of the Labor Party -- that the only way perhaps to curb the bombers is to take up some kind of permanent presence in the Palestinian towns.

How long it will last, whether it will be effective -- those are open questions and very difficult ones at this time. And they certainly put a cloud on any kind of initiative that the United States might be thinking of taking with that declaration by President Bush to try to map the way out of this ongoing, and as I say, seemingly deteriorating conflict.