January 23, 2002	Wednesday	Ziqa'ad 8, 1422

AL QUDS: His headquarters is flanked by Israeli tanks. The road to his front door has been blocked by a mountain of dirt, courtesy of the Israeli army. His territory is sliced into bits. Day by day, Israel tightens the noose around Yasser Arafat.

The Palestinian Authority president, whom Israel holds responsible for attacks on Israelis, is virtually cut off from the outside world at his headquarters in Ramallah and under an ever more stifling siege.

On Monday, Israel launched another phase in its campaign to crush Palestinian fighters and relegate Arafat to political oblivion.

Israeli forces seized control of the major West Bank town of Tulkarm, in Israel’s largest and most extensive incursion yet in nearly 16 months of fighting.

With army officials saying their raid is open-ended, this will be the first time that Israel has reoccupied in full a major Palestinian town or city since Israel and Arafat signed the landmark Oslo peace accords nearly nine years ago.

Scores of tanks and armoured personnel carriers rumbled into Tulkarm from all sides before dawn, firing mounted machine guns against sporadic Palestinian resistance as paratroopers seized homes, took up positions and began rounding up alleged fighters. They planted Israeli flags on top of several seized buildings, including the home of Mayor Mahmoud Jalad, witnesses said.

The army immediately ordered a 24-hour curfew. In a house-to-house dragnet, Israeli troops captured 18 people by dusk, the army said.

Military footage showed Palestinian men, blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs, lying face down on the floors in homes that soldiers had searched.

“The people were caught by surprise and shock by the number of tanks and soldiers who occupied the city,” Hassan Khreisheh, a member of the Palestinian legislature, said from his home in Tulkarm.

”Some people told me they did not see this many tanks and soldiers in the 1967 occupation,” when Israel conquered the West Bank. One Palestinian was killed in Tulkarm and two in Ramallah in the day’s fighting. No Israeli casualties were reported.

Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said that Tulkarm was a hotbed of terrorist activity and the first of several West Bank areas that his army plans to seize.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that the raid on Tulkarm came in response to last week’s shooting at a bat mitzvah celebration in the city of Hadera, in which six Israelis were killed by a member of a group affiliated with Arafat’s Fatah movement.

Since Friday, Israeli forces have stationed tanks and armoured personnel carriers outside Arafat’s offices in Ramallah.

The United Nations, through its special Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, said the Tulkarm operation represented a “dangerous escalation” by Israel that will only cost more lives on both sides of the conflict.

Arafat responded defiantly on Monday to his predicament, vowing to fight to the death for