Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat emerged apparently unhurt on Thursday from his damaged headquarters compound after Israeli troops ended a six-hour siege that left one of his security guards dead.
Arafat flashed a V-for-victory sign as he was greeted by about 100 cheering civilians and security guards. The Palestinian leader emerged two hours after Israeli troops left the compound after blowing up three buildings and exchanging fire with Arafat’s security guards. One security guard was killed.
”This will only increase the steadfastness of our people,” Arafat told the crowd.
The Israeli tanks had entered Ramallah in the early hours of Thursday after a 16-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber on Wednesday detonated a car bomb next to an Israeli bus, flipping it over twice as it caught fire.
Thirteen of the 17 people killed in the attack were Israeli soldiers in their late teens and early 20s. Thirty-eight others were hurt, 10 seriously. The attacker was also killed. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon delayed his departure for the United States after the bombing attack. Sharon was due to leave on Thursday for talks in New York before meeting US President George W Bush in Washington on Monday. Sharon put off his departure until Saturday night. A senior US official said Israel did not inform the US before the incursion and Washington did not give prior approval.
During Thursday’s siege Israeli tanks surrounded the huge compound in the centre of Ramallah before dawn. At first light bulldozers and several armoured personnel carriers punched through the walls and drove into the centre of the sprawling complex, a Palestinian security official at the scene said.
In Arafat’s office building, windows were shattered and ceilings had collapsed. In the room where he often receives guests and holds press conferences, a much-filmed picture of Jerusalem was riddled with holes from shrapnel. His master bedroom took a direct hit. Arafat, who was not in the room at the time, suggested Israel was trying to kill him, a charge denied by the Israeli military.
Some of the damage was caused by a shell or rocket that punched a wrecking ball-sized hole into the wall dividing the bedroom from the bathroom, mere metres from Arafat’s bed. However, nearby explosions might have caused further havoc.
”This is my bedroom. This is where I ate breakfast. I was supposed to sleep here [Wednesday night] but I had to do some work downstairs,” Arafat said. ”Of course they knew where I was, everybody knows this is my bedroom.”
Arafat called for immediate international intervention. ”This is fascism, Nazism,” he said. ”Attacks against headquarters … the rooms in which we sleep. I am asking the whole international world to move quickly to stop this fearsome aggression.”
In a statement issued at daybreak on Thursday the Israeli military said its forces took control of Arafat’s headquarters ”in the wake of a wave of Palestinian terrorism sweeping the state of Israel,” including the attack on the bus. The statement said the Palestinian Authority is ”directly responsible for terrorism that originates in its territory”.
Speculation has been rife that another attack against Israel would force the Israeli government to expel Arafat.
”Expel me?” the 72-year-old leader said, then laughed. ”I will die here.”