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RAMALLAH, Jan 18: Israel destroyed a Palestinian security compound in an air strike and tightened a ring of armour around Yasser Arafat on Friday after a Palestinian killed six people at a Jewish birthday party.
Israel’s raid in the West Bank city of Tulkarm killed one policeman and injured 40 people. Witnesses said troops shot dead another Palestinian during a stone-throwing clash near Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah, West Bank.
The new cycle of death and retribution pushed both sides deeper into a conflict that US and European truce efforts have sometimes calmed but never quelled.
Before dawn on Friday, Israeli F-16 warplanes fired missiles at the main security headquarters in Tulkarm, reducing the building to rubble.
The Israeli army said the air raid was a response to the shooting rampage in the northern Israeli city of Hadera on Thursday night. The Palestinian Authority condemned the attack.
The gunman, carrying an M-16 assault rifle, burst into a packed banquet hall where revellers were celebrating a bat mitzva, marking a Jewish girl’s 12th birthday, and sprayed them with bullets.
He killed six people, most of them Russian-speaking immigrants, in the first major attack in Israel since Arafat declared a ceasefire a month ago under intense international pressure to end a wave of suicide bombings by guerillas.
Party guests jumped the assailant, beating him and dragging him to the street where police shot him dead.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, attached to Arafat’s Fatah faction, said it carried out the attack to avenge the killing on Monday of one of its leaders, Raed al-Karmi, in a bomb blast it blamed on Israel. It said more revenge was coming.
In Ramallah, witnesses said Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles pushed to within 30 metres of the Palestinian president’s headquarters, the closest troops have come to the building in 15 months of violence.
About 300 stone-throwing Palestinians confronted the Israeli force, which responded with rubber-coated metal bullets, teargas and occasionally live ammunition. One Palestinian man was killed and eight were wounded, hospital officials said. The army had no immediate comment.
ARAFAT SURROUNDED: The army said in a statement that paratroops, infantry and armour had “tightened the encirclement” of Ramallah and deployed in several Palestinian-ruled areas in and around the city.
“The Israeli tanks have practically occupied about 55 percent of the town now,” said Mustafa Barghouthi, a Palestinian human rights activist based in Ramallah.
Israel has kept Arafat confined to Ramallah since last month, after a series of Palestinian attacks against Israelis, but has said he has no intention of toppling or harming him.
Before the attack in Hadera, the army tightened blockades of five Palestinian cities. Palestinians call the blockades collective punishment.
An Israeli government spokesman pledged to “teach the Palestinian Authority a lesson they will not forget” after the Hadera shooting, in which 33 people were injured.
Arafat adviser Nabil Abu Rdainah warned Israel against “crossing the red line and continuing the policy of assassination and incursion”. He called for US intervention.—Reuters
