Israel bombs Arafat office

Mar 30, 2002

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Friday - Israel launched an all-out drive Friday against the Palestinian leadership, smashing into Yasser Arafat’s West Bank base and triggering a new wave of violence after Wednesday’s massive suicide bombing.

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Friday - Israel launched an all-out drive Friday against the Palestinian leadership, smashing into Yasser Arafat’s West Bank base and triggering a new wave of violence after Wednesday’s massive suicide bombing. Israeli tanks, troops and helicopters were reported in control of the city of Ramallah. Heavy clashes erupted, leaving six dead and 29 wounded, as they moved on Arafat’s compound and raked his office with machinegun and tank fire in a declared attempt to “isolate” him. A top aide said Arafat was unhurt in the military action, which dealt a new blow to US efforts to reach a ceasefire and sparked new bloodshed elsewhere. A woman suicide bomber killed herself and an Israeli, and wounded 16 others, in a west Jerusalem supermarket. The attack was claimed by the Al-Aqsa Brigades, an armed offshoot of Arafat’s Fatah. Israeli police stormed Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque complex after Arab youths threw rocks at Jewish worshippers at the Wailing Wall below, authorities said. One policeman was slightly injured and five Muslims reported hurt. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government said it was calling up 20,000 reservists in a new escalation of the conflict sparked by the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, that has claimed more than 1,630 lives in 18 months. “The government has decided to consider Arafat, who is the head of a terrorist coalition, as an enemy, who at this stage must be isolated,” Sharon told a news conference after an all-night cabinet meeting. Looking visibly exhausted and wrought, Sharon said Israel would take “all the necessary measures to act and destroy the infrastructure of every terror element that exists.” Arafat, who had tried to head off the assault with a last-ditch appeal for an unconditional ceasefire late Thursday, said he was under tank and missile attack but remained defiant. “They want me to become a prisoner or fugitive, or dead,” he told the Arabic television station Al-Jazeera. “But I tell them no, (I’ll be) a martyr, a martyr, a martyr.” The Israeli push was prompted by the suicide bombing late Wednesday that killed 22 guests sitting down to a Passover dinner in a hotel in the northern coastal city of Netanya. The violence continued after Arafat’s ceasefire plea, with four Israeli settlers shot on the West Bank and two Israelis knifed in the Gaza before the Israeli incursion.

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