March 30, 2002
Israeli troops tightened their siege of a defiant Yasser Arafat in his battered headquarters on Saturday as the U.N. Security Council, with rare U.S. support, called for Israel to quit Palestinian cities. Israel criticised the council resolution for not stressing Palestinian responsibility for "terrorist" attacks which it said had prompted its drive into Palestinian areas.
The Palestinian Authority said the resolution was positive and demanded an immediate Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Israeli tanks blasted their way into Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's base on Friday. Aides said the embattled leader was losing contact with the outside world after Israeli forces cut telephone lines and water and power supplies to his ruined compound. Two of his bodyguards were wounded when tanks shelled their operations room overnight.
After an all-night session, the Security Council passed a resolution urging Israelis and Palestinians to move immediately to a "meaningful ceasefire." It "calls for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian cities, including Ramallah." The Foreign Ministry said Israel had no interest in remaining in Ramallah or any other areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, but gave no hint that it would leave.
"The resolution correctly notes the need for a ceasefire as the first stage. Unfortunately, until now the Palestinians have acted to torpedo any effort to achieve such a ceasefire," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Palestinians welcomed the resolution "provided that Israel implements it immediately and does not use it as a cover for procrastination and to prolong the invasion and the siege of the president," Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said.
"Everything depends on the Americans now," he told Reuters. The violence sweeping the region for the past 18 months shifted up a gear after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared Arafat an enemy and ordered an offensive, backed by tanks, against his Ramallah headquarters early on Friday.
U.S. SHIFT
The U.S. decision to support the resolution marked a change of position from Friday's comments by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who expressed sympathy with Israel's decision to respond militarily to a series of attacks on Israeli civilians. Israel's treatment of Arafat has drawn fierce international condemnation and severely dented hopes raised by an Arab summit's endorsement this week of a Middle East peace plan.
The European Union's Middle East envoy Miguel Angel Moratinos said he was returning to the region on Saturday to promote a ceasefire. "Arafat is not an enemy," he said in a statement, calling on Israel to lift its siege of Arafat's compound at once and withdraw from all Palestinian-ruled areas. U.N. envoy Terje Roed Larsen told Reuters Israel had denied him permission to visit Arafat.
The Palestinian president had responded to the assault on his compound with defiant telephone interviews to the media, but these dried up after his telephone lines were cut. "Nobody is shaken, afraid, or retreating," Arafat said in one such interview on Friday. "We are going to Jerusalem, giving millions of martyrs on the way."
Israeli forces, in a hard-hitting response to a suicide bombing which killed 22 Israelis on Wednesday, had used armoured bulldozers to smash their way into Arafat's West Bank headquarters and battled his forces from room to room. At least six Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were killed in some of the fiercest fighting since the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation began in September 2000. Scores of suspected militants were arrested.
The Israeli attack coincided with fresh violence as an 18-year-old woman suicide bomber blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket, killing two people and wounding at least 20. The attack, claimed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group linked to Arafat's Fatah group, was the second such suicide bombing carried out by a Palestinian woman.
FATAH FOUNDER SEIZED
Israeli forces seized Sakher Habash, a founder of Arafat's Fatah movement, after battering his offices in Ramallah on Saturday, Palestinian security officials said.
They said Habash, in his early 60s, had been detained with a score of others, including several Palestinian policemen, who had been holed up in a commercial building in Ramallah. Israeli troops detained scores of Palestinians in house-to-house searches elsewhere in Ramallah. The army said it had rounded up 145 Palestinians for questioning.
An Israeli security source identified two of the detainees as wanted Fatah militants named Abdul Karim Aweis and Hader Dabaya, both from the West Bank town of Jenin. Egyptian and Palestinian officials said Israel's latest actions amounted to a declaration of war after 18 months of strife in which 1,112 Palestinians and 383 Israelis have died.
Israeli armoured vehicles rumbled into the Palestinian town of Beit Jala between Jerusalem and biblical Bethlehem early on Saturday in an incursion the army said was aimed at preventing gunfire from Beit Jala at the nearby Jewish settlement of Gilo. In Gaza, about 4,000 people, including many gunmen, marched in the funeral of an Islamic Jihad militant killed on Friday after he stabbed two Israelis to death at a Jewish settlement.
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