JERUSALEM (Reuters) — A deadly Palestinian raid from Gaza into Israel and repeated rocket attacks could jeopardise Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plans to reshape the West Bank by abandoning some occupied territory.Less than a year after Israel withdrew thousands of Jewish settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip, attacks have surged even though many Israelis thought a quiet border would be the reward for pulling out after 38 years of occupation.

Hopes that peace talks might be revived were already minimal and the fighting could help to finally dash them.

But the violence is also prompting Israelis to question Olmert’s plan to unilaterally relocate up to 70,000 settlers from the West Bank, while keeping the biggest settlements, if negotiations with the Palestinians remain frozen.

“This will continue to add to perceptions that a West Bank pullout would be a strategic mistake,” said Cameron Brown, an analyst at Israel’s Herzliya Center, referring to Sunday’s raid when Hamas militants killed two soldiers and abducted another.

Israeli leaders have ordered the army to prepare a “harsh response” to the attack on a military post near the Gaza border, in which an Israeli soldier was also seized. Possible reprisals could include striking leaders of the Hamas-led government.

On top of the raid, militants in Gaza have fired 180 crude rockets at Israel in June alone. Recent Israeli air strikes in response have killed 20 Palestinians, 14 of them civilians.

Opinion polls have shown the rocket attacks were already eroding support for Olmert’s blueprint to impose final borders roughly along a barrier being built in the West Bank.

Palestinians condemn the plan, saying it will cement Israeli control on land they want for a state that would include all of Gaza and the West Bank.

Some Palestinians said they suspected the attack from Gaza would in fact strengthen Olmert’s resolve to move ahead with West Bank the plan.

“Olmert can claim the attack has returned things to ground zero and that there is no Palestinian peace partner,” said Gaza-based analyst Hani Habib.

But Olmert’s opponents argue that leaving heavily defended settlements in the West Bank will allow militants to get closer to Israeli towns along the “Green Line” boundary that separated Israel and the territory before the 1967 Middle East war.

“There is no question all of this is grist for the mill of people who oppose any kind of further disengagement,” said Mark Heller of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv.

Besides possibly targeting Hamas leaders, many analysts expect Olmert to order troops back into the arid coastal strip.

But this would pose a risk for his West Bank plan too, coming so soon after Israel quit Gaza under the assumption that any large-scale ground operations in the strip would not be needed once Palestinians controlled the territory.

Any incursion would have to be short and minimise Israeli casualties, analysts said.

Sunday’s raid was the first deadly attack from Gaza on soldiers since the pullout was completed in September.

The violence might strengthen expectations that Olmert will pay little more than lip-service to his pledge on trying to resume stalling peace talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas before embarking on his West Bank plan.

Olmert had been expected to hold a summit with Abbas, who favours negotiations, within weeks.

Now, even that meeting looks more doubtful.

Hopes of any substantive moves towards peace had already nosedived after Hamas, which is sworn to destroy Israel, trounced Abbas’s Fatah movement in January elections.

“You cannot pull out unilaterally in the face of terrorism because it looks like capitulation but you can’t negotiate in the face of terrorism either. Therefore you are by default left with nothing but more of the same,” said Heller.