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TEL AVIV, Feb 8: Israel launched raids in the West Bank on Friday after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ruled out Yasser Arafat as a peace partner, as the Palestinian Authority welcomed the US refusal to boycott Arafat but called for a more active US role.
Israeli tanks moved into the Palestinian town of Nablus and a nearby village, in a second day of Israeli retaliation for an attack on a Jewish settlement that left four dead on Wednesday, including the Palestinian guerilla.
Palestinian security sources said two Palestinians were later wounded, one seriously, when the army opened fire on people attending a symbolic funeral for the Hamas man killed in Wednesday’s attack.
The army occupied a building in Nablus, where Israeli helicopter gunships fired on a Palestinian Authority intelligence office late on Thursday, causing no casualties and only slight damage.
Rockets seized at an Israeli checkpoint earlier this week were manufactured in Nablus, the army said in a statement, charging that the town had turned into a “haven of terrorism”.
Israeli tanks and jeeps on Friday also entered the West Bank village of Tamoun, to the north of Nablus. The operation aimed to arrest suspected accomplices of the Hamra settlement attacker, Mohammed Ziad al-Khalili, Israeli radio said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, left in charge during Sharon’s visit to the United States, warned that the Palestinians will “have to pay a high price for terrorism”.
In separate operations, Israel said its troops captured three radicals from the Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups in the autonomous West Bank towns of Bir Zeit and Al Khalil overnight.
SHOT DEAD: A Palestinian man died and another was shot and wounded by Israeli police in a chase in the occupied eastern sector of Al Quds after an Israeli woman was found stabbed, a police source said.
The man collapsed, apparently from a heart attack, as he was being arrested and efforts to revive him failed, the source said, adding the woman was taken to hospital in critical condition.
On the peace front, Sharon said Israel could accept the creation of a Palestinian state, but only once the threat of “terrorism” has been decisively laid to rest and other conditions met.
The Palestinian Authority on Friday welcomed Bush’s refusal to boycott Arafat and accused Sharon of trying to destroy any peace hopes.
Bush’s position “constitutes a step in the right direction”, said Arafat’s adviser Nabil Abu Rudeina, who nevertheless criticized “the absence of a serious US role, warning it would increase tension” in the area.
EU ROLE: In Madrid, European Commission president Romano Prodi said a refusal by Israel to let the European Union play a formal role in peace efforts has kept the EU on the sidelines.
“On the role of the European Union, let’s be frank, we have never played a role in the region. The Israelis have never acknowledged a European role,” he said in an interview published in the Spanish daily, El Pais.
Germany nevertheless announced on Friday it was sending its foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, to the region next week.—AFP
