January 17, 2002	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 2, 1422

TEL AVIV, Jan 16: Israel vowed on Wednesday to keep Yasser Arafat confined to the West Bank city of Ramallah despite the arrest by Palestinian police of a guerilla leader wanted by Israel for the assassination of a minister.

Israeli officials voiced scepticism about the detention late on Tuesday of Ahmed Saadat, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which followed the killing of two Jewish settlers that further strained a battered ceasefire.

In an incident on Wednesday, a body with gunshot wounds was found in an Israeli car in the West Bank north of the Palestinian-ruled city of Nablus, Israeli security sources said. The exact circumstances of the death were not immediately clear.

A group linked to Arafat’s Fatah movement said it had killed the two settlers on Tuesday to avenge the death in an explosion on Monday of one of its leaders, Raed al-Karmi, accused by Israel of deadly attacks. Israeli security sources said Israel was behind the blast.

The new cycle of bloodshed dealt another blow to U.S. efforts to cement a ceasefire that Arafat announced a month ago under intense international pressure to rein in Islamic militants after a wave of suicide bombings in Israel.

A U.S. State Department spokesman said the killing of Avi Boaz, 72, a U.S. citizen seized at a Palestinian roadblock near Bethlehem and taken away to be shot, was further proof of “the necessity of bringing an immediate end to violence”.

Hours after Boaz was shot, Palestinian gunmen killed a woman settler at Givat Zeev, north of Jerusalem.

An Israeli government official said Saadat’s detention would not alter the demand that Arafat arrest all four PFLP suspects in the October killing of Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi before the Palestinian leader would be allowed to leave Israeli-encircled Ramallah.—Reuters