October 23, 2001	Tuesday	Shaba'an 5, 1422

AL QUDS: With Israeli forces mounting their broadest offensive against the Palestinians in years, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon faced the rumblings of a rebellion from within his coalition government.

Leaders of the centrist Labour Party said that they would consider quitting the government if Israeli forces expanded their reoccupation of Palestinian territory and threatened the survival of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Several Labour Party officials said that they were afraid the fighting was spinning out of control, and that Israel was moving toward a full-scale reoccupation of Palestinian land from which it has withdrawn in the last seven years under the Oslo peace agreements.

“The situation is very worrying and could deteriorate into warfare,” said Raanan Cohen, secretary general of the Labour Party. “If the escalation and inflammatory speech continue, there is no room for the Labour Party in the government.”

“We are reconquering the West Bank and Gaza and the Labour Party didn’t enter the government for this,” said Haim Ramon, a prominent Labour Party politician. “We thought we could influence the direction of the government toward a (negotiated) agreement and this hasn’t happened. It’s clear the Labour party can’t be in a government that returns to Gaza and sends our children to the alleyways of Gaza. And that’s what will happen.”

Along with Sharon’s hard-line Likud Party, the Labour Party constitutes the main pillar of Israel’s governing coalition. Its withdrawal from the coalition would deprive Sharon of a majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and could force premature elections.

Sharon and his close allies, including Labour Party member Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the defence minister, have said that they did not intend to hold Palestinian territory indefinitely. They said that they would order Israeli forces out of West Bank cities they have entered in recent days as soon as Arafat began a serious campaign to crush groups and freedom fighters operating from Palestinian areas.

“Israel has no interest in remaining in places where the army has entered,” Sharon was quoted as saying in a communique after the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday. “The amount of time the army stays in these areas depends, to a large extent, on Arafat and the actions he takes to prevent terrorism.”

The previous two governments, led successively by Likud and Labour, have been toppled by infighting within and between parties. Labour constitutes Sharon’s single largest voting bloc in the Knesset, and its loss would be a devastating blow.

For months, the tensions within the government have been manageable, despite frequent sharp disagreements between Sharon and his foreign minister, Shimon Peres of the Labour Party.

But with the army’s sudden offensive in recent days, triggered by the assassination of right-wing Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi last week, the strains have burst into the open. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.