WASHINGTON – In a telecast to the Arab world, Secretary of State Powell called yesterday for an end to the intifada, the four-year violent Palestinian Arab uprising against Israel.

“What has it accomplished for the Palestinian people?” Mr. Powell asked. “Has it produced progress toward a Palestinian state? Has it defeated Israel on the battlefield?”

“So it is time to end this process,” he told Al Jazeera TV. “It is time to end the intifada.”

At the same time, Mr. Powell said President Bush desperately wants to help create a Palestinian Arab state for the Palestinian Arab people to live side-by-side in peace with Israel.

“This will only come about when terror is ended,” he said. “And the intifada has spawned terrorism and it has not achieved anything in these years.”

In the meantime, Mr. Powell said, the economy of the Palestinian Arab people has deteriorated as well as life in general for the Palestinian Arabs, while Israel has built a security fence to screen out attackers.

“It has stopped us from being able to move forward with the many peace plans that we have put forward,” he said.

Mr. Powell again criticized Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Arab leader, for not yielding authority to Prime Minister Qurei so Mr. Qurei can organize Palestinian Arab security forces to end terror.

And Mr. Powell criticized Israel, saying Mr. Bush has concerns about its settlement activity and not destroying all outposts on the West Bank.

But when the interviewer suggested Mr. Powell was blaming the Palestinian Arabs and supporting “the occupier,” Israel, he bristled.

“Who are the victims?” he replied. “The victims are those who are being blown up by bombs.”

Israel has had to protect itself by going after individuals they believe are responsible for terror attacks, Mr. Powell said.

“And so, there are victims on all sides of this question,” he said.

Meanwhile, a Palestinian Arab rocket slammed into a street in this southern Israeli town yesterday, killing two preschool children playing in a yard as Israelis ushered in the fall harvest festival of Sukkot.

Prime Minister Sharon phoned the Sderot mayor, Eli Moyal, and told him that “Israel will respond” to the attack, a government official said.

The rocket attack came in defiance of a major Israeli raid into the nearby Gaza Strip aimed at rooting out terrorists behind an unending wave of rocket attacks in recent weeks. The raid, which began late Tuesday, killed four Palestinian Arabs and wounded 46 others, Palestinian Arab hospital officials said.

In response to the Sderot attack, Israeli security officials said they would broaden the operation in northern Gaza; an Israeli helicopter strike near a Gaza refugee camp killed one Palestinian Arab terrorist and wounded another.

Elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, seven Palestinian Arabs, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed by Israeli army fire.

The government official said Mr. Sharon promised Mr. Moyal that the military would make it more difficult for Palestinian Arabs to launch missiles at the border town. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not give details.

The rocket slammed into a quiet street early yesterday evening, just as Sukkot was beginning. Most residents in the neighborhood are immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union.

The blast blew out the windows of a house, showered a minibus with shrapnel and killed two children of Ethiopian descent. Dorit Benesay, 2, and Yuval Abeva, 4, were playing under an olive tree outside Yuval’s grandmother’s house when the rocket struck, emergency workers and neighbors said.

“After the rocket fell, a man, maybe 20 years old, took the boy in his arms. He was in shock. He ran with the boy, he didn’t know what to do,” said Zina Shurov, 48, a neighbor. “I saw the boy, he had no legs.”

The homemade Qassam rocket was the 30th to hit Israeli communities in the past month and the 14th to hit Sderot in that time, according to the Israeli army.