Israeli occupation forces seized a band of territory in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday, effectively setting up a security zone in what the occupation army called an open-ended campaign to thwart Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel. "We will remain for as long as is necessary...and if we decide to hold on to this territory for a long time, we will," Colonel Yoel Strick, commander of Israel's northern Gaza brigade, told Occupation army Radio.

The creation of what Israeli Occupation army Radio dubbed a security zone came on the heels of a raid on a Gaza refugee camp on Thursday in which 11 Palestinians were killed, bloodshed that followed a resistance bombing that killed 15 people in Israel.

Amid the violence, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat asked Mahmoud Abbas -- who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Mazen and has kept a back-channel open to Israeli leaders during the past 29 months of fighting -- to be prime minister, a post international peace mediators want created.

"The incursions cannot continue if we want to give the prime minister the chance to succeed," Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said.

Palestinian security sources said at least a dozen Israeli tanks and other armored vehicles backed by helicopter gunships pushed some two kilometers (one mile) deeper into the Gaza Strip from the northern Erez border crossing.

The force rolled to the edge of Jabalya refugee camp, where Thursday's fighting took place, and the town of Beit Hanoun, establishing an armored triangle of observation posts and roadblocks that put some 10,000 Palestinians under Israeli guns.

Recent operations in Gaza have drawn international criticism over civilian casualties and fueled Palestinian fears that Israel's new rightist government will reoccupy all of the Strip while world attention is focused on possible U.S. war on Iraq .

ROCKET ATTACKS

The occupation army said in a statement the new Gaza deployment "was part of an attempt to...prevent the launching of Qassam rockets toward Israeli communities near the northern Gaza Strip."

Three of the rudimentary rockets slammed into the southern Israeli town of Sderot on Thursday, causing no casualties, hours after the crushing raid on Jabalya, a resistance stronghold.

As Israeli occupation troops dug in at the new northern Gaza observation points, Palestinian youngsters gathered at the bottom of one hilltop post. The stones they threw at a tank perched on high dropped short of their mark.

Israel handed over most of the Gaza Strip to Palestinian self-rule under interim peace deals in the 1990s, with Jewish settlements established after the area was occupied in the 1967 Middle East war remaining in place.

Israel last declared a security zone in south Lebanon. It occupied the zone for 22 years until it withdrew in 2000 under constant attack by Lebanese Hizbollah guerrillas.

On the political front, Abbas, known as a relative moderate, said he was not interested in becoming the first Palestinian prime minister if the post was only symbolic.

"I will respond positively or negatively after I know what powers the prime minister will have," the senior Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) official told Reuters.

Arafat has been under intense pressure from the United States and the European Union to reform the Palestinian Authority and appoint a powerful prime minister to take over day-to-day running of the Authority.

The process of establishing the post of prime minister was to begin on Saturday at a meeting of the PLO's Central Council in the West Bank city of Ramallah, to be followed by the convening on Monday of the Palestinian parliament.

At least 1,906 Palestinians and 720 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian uprising for statehood began.

PHOTO CAPTION

Palestinians pray in front of a mosque at the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza Strip March 7, 2003. Israeli forces seized a band of territory in northern Gaza in what a senior officer said was an open-ended stay to thwart Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel. The creation of what Israeli occupation Army Radio called a security zone came on the heels of a raid on a Gaza refugee camp on Thursday in which 11 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 injured, bloodshed that followed a resistance bombing that killed 15 people in Israel. (Jose Manuel Ribeiro/Reuter