JERUSALEM (REUTERS) — Israel decided Sunday to keep Palestinian President Yasser Arafat confined to the West Bank city of Ramallah even though he has ordered the arrest of militants wanted by Israel.
The decision, overwhelmingly supported by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 14-member security cabinet, drew swift Palestinian condemnation and cancellation of joint security talks and raised tensions after renewed efforts to calm violence.
“There won’t be any meetings with the Israelis for the time being, whether it’s on the security level or the political level,” Nabil Abu Rdainah, a senior Arafat aide, told reporters.
Tensions were strained further after Israeli soldiers fired at Palestinian Parliamentary Speaker Ahmed Korei’s armored BMW car as it approached a military checkpoint in the West Bank. Korei was not hurt ,and Israel later apologized for the incident.
Sharon said Israel would continue to prevent Arafat leaving Ramallah but that the army would ease its two-month-old tank blockade of Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah and let him move freely around the city.
Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said he had ordered the army to remove the tanks around Arafat’s headquarters.
Arafat had not been totally confined to his compound. The Palestinian leader has recently been traveling within the city without Israeli interference, visiting a hospital last week to comfort wounded Palestinians and praying in a mosque Friday.
“It is a shameless and unacceptable decision,” Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said. “This reflects the fact that this government has no political program whatsoever and is determined to pursue the path of destruction.”
In Brussels, a European Union official who declined to be named said the EU was disappointed with the decision.
“The decision expected was a full relaxation of the confinement,” the official said.
Israel made removal of the restrictions conditional on the arrest of four militants who assassinated Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi in October. The Palestinian Authority arrested three suspects Thursday.
Sharon said Israel now wanted the men extradited to stand trial in the Jewish state. Arafat was widely expected to reject the demand.
Meanwhile, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres telephoned Korei to apologize for the Sunday evening shooting incident.
The army said the soldiers fired warning shots into the air when a car approached the checkpoint at speed and they feared it was going to run them down. Israeli troops have been jittery since last week’s killing of six soldiers at a checkpoint.
At least 890 Palestinians and 274 Israelis have been killed since a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation began in September 2000 after peace negotiations broke down.
Mixed Views
Reading from the security cabinet’s decision, Sharon said he would personally decide on any future request by Arafat to leave Ramallah, a statement Palestinians saw as another attempt by the right-wing prime minister to humiliate their leader.
But some Israeli commentators said the decision to remove the ring of armor around Arafat’s compound was a first step by Sharon toward meeting international calls to let him go while avoiding any immediate crisis in Israel’s coalition government.
“It seems balanced to me,” cabinet minister Matan Vilnai of the center-left Labour Party said about the decision.
Right-wing ministers had said there should be no change to the terms of confinement, and one of them, National Infrastructure Minister Avigdor Lieberman, had threatened to quit if Arafat was allowed to leave Ramallah.
Israeli tanks encircled Arafat’s Ramallah compound in mid-December after a wave of deadly attacks on Israelis by Palestinian militants.
The security cabinet convened after signs at the weekend that Israel and the Palestinian Authority were seeking to put a week of bloody violence behind them and reduce tension.
Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs had been scheduled to meet Sunday to discuss ways of curbing violence. The meeting would have been a follow-up to Thursday’s talks.
However, Mohammed Dahlan, head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service in the Gaza Strip, told Reuters that the Palestinians canceled the session in protest of the decision to keep Arafat confined to Ramallah
.
Sharon request denied
After the cabinet decision, Arafat rejected Sharon’s request to meet again with Korei, according to Arafat’s unofficial deputy Mahmoud Abbas and economic adviser Mohammed Rashid, a senior Palestinian official.
Sharon held talks with them several weeks ago in what appeared to be an attempt to defuse tensions and build a relationship with possible successors to Arafat, who the Israeli leader deems “irrelevant.”
In a surge of blood-letting over the past week alone, 42 Palestinians — including three suicide bombers and 11 Israelis — were killed.
There has been a lull in raids on Palestinian targets since Friday after the previous day’s joint security meeting.
