December 5, 2001
Israeli Missiles Hit Arafat Compound and Other Sites
By JAMES BENNET
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Dec. 4 — In the most wide-ranging attack on Palestinian areas in 14 months of conflict, Israeli warplanes and helicopters bombarded security offices today in eight areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, killing at least two Palestinians and injuring scores.
Helicopters fired three missiles into the walled compound here of the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat. The missiles destroyed several cars and punched a hole in the stone wall of a police building less than 100 yards from Mr. Arafat's office, where he was said to have been at work.
Mr. Arafat, under increasing pressure from the Israelis and from Palestinian extremists, accused Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of blocking the very campaign to arrest militants that he had insisted Mr. Arafat conduct. "He doesn't want me to succeed," Mr. Arafat told CNN, appealing for international support.
Today's attacks were a significant intensification of the assault on Mr. Arafat and his authority. On Monday, the Israelis attacked Mr. Arafat's helicopters and Gaza offices when he was in Ramallah.
Israeli officials said they had no intention of harming Mr. Arafat or any Palestinian civilians. They said their goal was to compel Mr. Arafat to act against terrorists by threatening his hold on power.
Israel began attacking Palestinian-controlled areas after three suicide bombings over the weekend, which killed 25 people. The extremist Islamist group Hamas said it conducted the bombings to avenge Israel's killing on Nov. 23 of a senior Hamas leader accused of terrorism.
As part of the antiterror campaign, President Bush said in Washington today that Federal agents had raided four offices of an organization that, he said, raised money for Hamas to train children to become suicide bombers. [Page A8.]
In other military action, Israeli missiles destroyed a security headquarters in Gaza City, killing a security officer and a 17-year-old boy who was walking to school, hospital officials said. As the explosions sent plumes of black smoke skyward, hundreds of children from a nearby school ran for cover. About 150 people were injured, 20 seriously, hospital officials said.
The force of the blast badly damaged the nearby home of Hamdi Ferwana, 55, and seriously injured his wife and daughter-in-law. "This is a tragedy," he said bitterly. "Maybe Arafat now is happy. Let him and his group be happy, that's what I want."
Beginning well before dawn, the Israeli attacks today ranged from Salfit, a village on the West Bank, where missiles struck what the army said was the headquarters of the Palestinian Military Intelligence, to the southern tip of Gaza, where bulldozers scored trenches in the runway of Gaza International Airport.
Officials on both sides described the violence, which has intensified rapidly over the past two weeks, as war.
After a five-and-a-half-hour meeting overnight Monday, the Israeli government declared the Palestinian Authority to be "an entity that supports terrorism."
A full-scale military campaign, however, could threaten Mr. Sharon's unity government as well as the Palestinian Authority, which governs Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Members of the left-wing Labor party walked out of the cabinet's meeting early this morning rather than take part in its decision.
Palestinian leaders said they had arrested more than 100 militants since declaring a state of emergency on Sunday. But they said Israelis had hobbled their efforts by firing upon security offices, sending tanks into positions in Palestinian-controlled territory here and elsewhere, and blockading Palestinian cities.
"After a major drive to arrest people, it is our security offices that are being targeted, not Hamas and Islamic Jihad," Nabil Shaath, a senior Palestinian minister, said in a telephone interview while he toured the damage in Gaza. "There is a limit to what can be done."
The severity of that limit was suggested by Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the Palestinian uprising. In an interview here, Mr. Barghouti declared that all Palestinians supported Mr. Arafat, but he also suggested that there was no legitimate reason to arrest members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Mr. Arafat's organization, Fatah, he said, was "not a terrorist group, and the Hamas and Islamic Jihad, all of them, are part of the Palestinian liberation national movement, and they have the right to fight against the Israeli occupation."
Asked if he would continue to fight with those groups, Mr. Barghouti said, "We will continue to work with our people in all Palestinian factions, to continue our struggle."
For some, Mr. Arafat's arrests have already gone too far. One woman, who declined to identify herself, was leaving a jail here this afternoon with five of her children after visiting her husband, a member of Hamas. "This is what we used to see from the Israelis under occupation," she said, "not from the Palestinian Authority. This is humiliation."
She said Palestinian security forces arrived at her house after midnight early Monday and took her husband away. "Their excuse was, `This is a storm, and in order to avoid the storm we should arrest him,' " she said. "They said, `We have instructions' — their instructions are coming from Israel."
But Israeli officials said Mr. Arafat had not yet acted against the most dangerous militants.
In the Israeli unity government, Shimon Peres, the foreign minister and the Labor Party's senior leader, has frequently played the good cop to Mr. Sharon's bad cop. Today he again suggested that he favored a softer line, saying Mr. Arafat should be "given a chance."
"I expect he will become a leader who makes decisions," Mr. Peres said, after meeting in Bucharest, Romania, with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. "Right now, he is reluctant and hesitant at a time when decisions are necessary."
Labor Party leaders are to meet Wednesday to discuss withdrawing from the government, but no such action appears imminent.
"Yesterday was the first time that the extreme right's policy became the government's policy," said Avraham Burg, the speaker of the Israeli parliament and Labor Party member. "If it's a one-time eruption of emotion, I will say, `O.K., maybe the time is not right.' But if it becomes systematic policy, I would say the days of the Labor Party in the government are numbered."
Israeli officials expressed confidence today that after the suicide bombings, they retained full American support for their campaign to press Mr. Arafat.
After Palestinian gunmen who said they were avenging the killing of the leader of their faction shot dead Israel's tourism minister on Oct. 17, Israeli forces occupied positions in seven Palestinian towns in the West Bank. In that case, the Bush administration considered the response disproportionate and ultimately pressed the Israelis to withdraw.
This time, the Bush administration has not accused Mr. Sharon of overplaying his hand.
Israeli troops have now returned to some of the positions in Ramallah that they left on Nov. 7. In a driving wind and icy rain, tanks and other armored vehicles churned through the streets today. With the increased Israeli presence came the familiar exchanges of low-grade violence that are deepening the divide between the two populations.
At the Kalandia checkpoint, a Palestinian who attempted to slip past a barrier was accosted by an Israeli soldier, who butted his helmet into the man's face.
In neighboring Bituniya, boys hurled stones up a hill at two dozen Israeli soldiers holding a position by two jeeps. The soldiers responded with tear gas that briefly dispersed the boys. But a few minutes later at least one Palestinian sniper opened fire, destroying a jeep's radiator in a burst of steam. The soldiers fired back as reinforcements worked their way forward, protected by a tank that rumbled forward to replace the jeeps at the top of the hill.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
