TULKARM (West Bank), Jan 21: Israeli tanks and troops took over Tulkarm in the West Bank on Monday in what Palestinian officials said was the first reoccupation of an entire city during the intifada.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, confined in his Ramallah headquarters by an encirclement of Israeli tanks, condemned the Israeli raid in Tulkarm, and reaffirmed he would seek a Palestinian state with the eastern quarter of Al Quds as its capital even if it cost him his life.

“They have crossed all red lines and our people cannot stand with their eyes closed to these Israeli attempts, and the proof of this is the strong and firm steadfastness of our people in Tulkarm,” he said.

The incursion into Tulkarm, in the northern West Bank, was in reprisal for a Palestinian attack in northern Israel last week in which six people were killed, and signalled yet another setback to US peace efforts.

Hospital officials said Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian man in a gunfight in Tulkarm and killed a man in a battle in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Monday.

Speaking to Palestinian intellectuals in Ramallah, where Israeli tanks have taken up positions just a few dozen metres from his offices, Arafat said: “The Palestinian state will be established with Al Quds al-Sharif as its capital. By God, I see it coming, martyred or alive.”

Witnesses said Israeli tanks occupied positions throughout Tulkarm, a move the army said was in response to the shooting during a Jewish coming-of-age party in northern Israel on Thursday.

The army said the killer was from Tulkarm and it had entered the city to strike at a “large terror infrastructure”.

Palestinian minister Saeb Erekat said in a statement: “The reoccupation of Tulkarm is part of a gradual reoccupation of all Palestinian Authority areas”.

But a senior Israeli security source called it a “short-term operation. There is no intention of reoccupying Tulkarm”.

Some Palestinians defied the Israeli-imposed curfew and Palestinian guerillas in eastern Tulkarm fired at troops, witnesses said. Soldiers searched houses and detained several people.

Erekat called the incursion “state terrorism” and said it showed Israel planned to retake all areas it had turned over to Palestinian control in recent years under interim peace accords.—Reuters