There is no end to the bloodletting as Israel responds to a surge in Palestinian attacks
Suzanne Goldenberg in Jerusalem
Israeli army helicopters attacked the headquarters of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s elite forces on Wednesday night after another suicide bomber claimed the lives of two teenagers.
Witnesses said helicopter gunships fired missiles on Gaza and the West Bank city of Ramallah, setting buildings and cars on fire, knocking out electricity and killing at least two Palestinians. Dozens were wounded.
An adviser to Arafat said the retaliatory strikes had destroyed the last chances of peace. “This is a dangerous escalation,” said Nabil Abu Rdainah, who was with Arafat in the Jordanian capital, Amman, for the Arab summit. “We hold the Israeli government fully responsible.”
A military representative told Israeli television that the helicopters had fired on six targets in the Gaza Strip, including installations of Arafat’s Force 17 in the Jabaliya refugee camp and a police installation in Deir al-Baleh in the south. In Ramallah, tanks and helicopters struck a single target, again a building of Force 17. “Our task is to hit directly at the sources of fire,” the representative said. Palestinian officials said the Israeli army had warned them to evacuate the headquarters of Arafat’s administration in Ramallah, signalling an imminent attack.
The hour-long attacks were the physical expression of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s regular accusations against Force 17. He has repeatedly blamed the unit, and by implication Arafat, for drive-by shootings of Jewish settlers, and the firing on their enclaves by Palestinian militants.
He also blamed Arafat for the suicide mission that killed two schoolboys earlier on Wednesday which the armed wing of the Islamist militant organisation Hamas said it carried out because his administration had freed many jailed bombers. “To my sorrow, despite the fact that many in the world thought a new leader had arisen here, to my sorrow he [Arafat] has remained a leader of terror,” Sharon said in Parliament, hours before ordering the attacks.
The reprisal raids had been anticipated. Since a sniper’s bullet killed 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass on Monday in the extremist Jewish enclave inside the West Bank city of Hebron, Sharon has faced a growing clamour to retaliate swiftly and harshly against commanders of the Palestinian uprising.
The pressure increased with two bombings in Jerusalem on Tuesday, and Wednesday morning’s suicide attack in central Israel. The cry for revenge put Sharon in a peculiar position: the hardliner with a 50-year history of dealing harshly with Israel’s Arab neighbours was being accused of going soft since his installation as prime minister three weeks ago.
It also showed up his own helplessness in soothing Israelis’ anxieties on security, the same fears that saw former prime minister Ehud Barak trounced at the polls last month. “Everyone who sees these things that have occurred over the course of 36 hours understands exactly what kind of situation we are in,” Sharon told Israel Radio on Wednesday. Then he promised: “If our deterrence has been slightly eroded it will soon be fully restored.”
Most analysts ?and Sharon’s advisers, who claimed he could not be provoked into intemperate action had predicted that he would hold off for the duration of an Arab summit.
The meeting in Amman, at which the Palestinians sought to solidify regional support behind their six-month uprising, ended on Wednesday afternoon, and Sharon wasted no time in exacting punishment. The helicopter gunships began clattering over Ramallah within minutes of the convening of an emergency meeting of his Security Cabinet, which was expected to chart Israel’s next course of action in response to a surge in Palestinian attacks.
Sharon is now expected to consider further measures. In opposition, he repeatedly opposed Barak’s policy of bombing raids on Palestinian police installations, denouncing them as ineffective.
But Sharon will have to weigh his next steps carefully. For all of his efforts to implicate Arafat directly in the bombing attacks inside the borders of the Jewish state, and the drive-by shootings that have terrified Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, the retaliatory missions remain extremely controversial in the international community, and Sharon knows it.
On Wednesday morning Sharon held a telephone conversation with United States President George Bush, part of a broader strategy in which Israel is seeking diplomatic sanction for a resort to greater military might to try to end the uprising.