February 9, 2002	Saturday	Ziqa’ad 25, 1422

TEL AVIV, Feb 8: Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer said US Vice President Dick Cheney told him that Israel could “hang” Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as far as he was concerned, Yediot Aharonot newspaper reported on Friday.

“The vice president told me: ‘As far as I am concerned, you can even hang him,’” Ben Eliezer said in an interview with the mass circulation paper, adding that he heard similar comments from advisers of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“On this subject (of Arafat), Cheney is more extreme than Revaham Zeevi,” he said, referring to Israel’s far-right tourism minister who was assassinated by Palestinian radicals in October.

Ben Eliezer said on Thursday after talks in Washington with Cheney, Rumsfeld and US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that he had called upon Washington to boycott Arafat and to open a dialogue with other Palestinian leaders.

Rice and Cheney told him that talking to Arafat is “a waste of time” and the vice president was the most extreme on this point, he said at a press conference in the US capital.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in talks with Bush failed to convince Washington to boycott Arafat and rely on other Palestinian leaders for peace negotiations.—AFP