US says no change in its stand Sharon threatens to kill Arafat
TEL AVIV, April 23: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on Friday he was no longer bound by a pledge he gave US President George Bush not to harm Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
"I said during our first meeting about three years ago that I accepted his request not to harm Arafat physically," Mr Sharon told Israel's Channel 2. "But I am released from this commitment. I release myself from this commitment regarding Arafat."
Shortly after Mr Sharon's comments, the US State Department said it stood by its opposition to the assassination of Mr Arafat. "Nothing has changed in the US position and I will look at the statement and see what we have to say," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.
Mr Sharon said he told this to Mr Bush last week during a meeting with him at the White House, where he received US approval for his plan to unilaterally evacuate all settlements from the Gaza Strip and some in the West Bank.
Mr Sharon gave no indication that any move against Yasser Arafat was imminent. Although the United States does not acknowledge the Palestinian leader, Washington is opposed to Israel killing him. An adviser to Mr Arafat, Nabil Abu Rdainah, said Ariel Sharon's statement would lead to increased tensions in the region.
"We reject Sharon's statement and demand clarification from Mr Bush on such a statement and hold Sharon responsible for such a dangerous statement," he said. "This is an escalation and will lead to increased tensions." Mr Sharon's tough talk could go down well among members of his right-wing Likud party who will vote on his Gaza withdrawal plan on May 2.
The Israeli premier's televised comments expanded on similar remarks he made in a newspaper interview several weeks ago.
DY PM'S WARNING: Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned on Friday of "very serious consequences" if the Likud party rejected Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. "If the plan is not approved, the results will be very serious for Israel on the political, security and economic level," Mr Olmert said on radio.
Ehud Olmert, who is also a Likud party leader, said he was concerned by the weak mobilization of the plan's supporters in contrast to the strong showing of its opponents. He said "very few ministers have gone out" to defend the plan with party rank-and-file, although most of them have finally, after some hesitation, said they would support it following Mr Sharon's success in getting President Bush to back him during last week's summit.
Mr Sharon on Thursday warned parliament that the party referendum "did not commit him from a legal point of view, was not binding and had primarily a moral value". Latest opinion polls show that party supporters of Mr Sharon's plan have fallen off sharply even though they remain in the majority.
A poll published by the Yediot Aharonot showed 49 per cent of Likud members in favour, against nearly 40 per cent opposed - a lead of some 10 points. A week ago, a poll in the same newspaper gave the "yes" vote a lead of 22 points. According to poll results published in Thursday's daily Haaretz, supporters of the Sharon plan had a lead of just four points.
OPERATION ENDS: A Palestinian man was killed on Friday by Israeli fire near the West Bank town of Nablus as the army said it had wrapped up a three-day operation in the Gaza Strip that left as many as 16 Palestinians dead.
Yasser Abu Leimun, 32, was killed in Talluza, seven kilometres north of Nablus, when exchanges of fire broke out between troops and wanted militants. An Israeli army spokeswoman said the dead man was a member of the Hamas movement and part of a group of four men troops had sought to arrest.
She said the three other men managed to escape. But Abu Leimun's family said he was a university professor unknown for his political affiliations and had been killed outside his house by a stray bullet. Six Palestinians, some of them armed militants, were killed in the West Bank in the past 48 hours.
There was also no let-up in bloodshed in the Gaza Strip, where a three-day operation that ended late Thursday left 16 Palestinians dead. In the southern Gaza Strip, two militant groups claimed a joint attack on Israeli soldiers near the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom on Thursday.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said two soldiers were moderately wounded by anti-tank fire. An offshoot of Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and the Popular Resistance Committee - a group consisting of ex-Fatah activists - said they "hit a military outpost north of Deir al Balah and wounded two Zionist soldiers".
"The attack came in response to massacres perpetrated by the Zionist enemy," the statement also said. Israel maintained a high security alert on Friday still fearing reprisal for its assassination of Hamas's top leaders.
"We are in very high security alert and have been for the past three weeks since the assassination of Sheikh Yassin," said an Israeli police spokesman, referring to Hamas's spiritual leader killed in a March 22 air strike. -Reuters/AFP
