Israelis Pull Back From Arafat Compound
Israeli tanks and troops pulled back tonight from Yasir Arafat's battered headquarters compound in Ramallah but maintained a curfew that has confined some 200,000 people to their homes there for the last three days.

The celebration was brief. Israeli military officials described the troop movements as a redeployment and said the city would remain under curfew, at least for the time being, with a complement of troops still surrounding it.

"There's a redeployment within the city," said one military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It's turning into less rather than more. But it's short of a full withdrawal."

"It's a dreadful situation," the Palestinians' chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said as he waited to be let out of the compound shortly before the tanks pulled back. "It is a total siege."

Military and human rights officials also counted a dozen people killed in Israel and the Palestinian territories over the previous night and day. Eleven were Palestinians, including five gunmen shot by soldiers during what the army said was an apparent attempt to attack an isolated Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip.

Another of the dead was an 8-year-old Bedouin boy, Hussein Abdul al-Matwi. Palestinian rights officials said he had been in his home in Gaza when he was struck by fire from the machine gun of an Israeli tank. Military officials said the army was investigating the incident.

The easing of the army's stranglehold on Ramallah — which included a three-hour break in the curfew this morning so that people could buy food — coincided with the return of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who had been visiting Washington and, most recently, London.

Palestinian officials, angry at the warm reception that Mr. Sharon received from President Bush, accused his administration of giving Israel a free hand to continue its strikes against the Palestinian Authority.

"They say that Israel has a right to defend itself," a senior aide to Mr. Arafat, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, said after leaving his headquarters late tonight. "But this is not self-defense. This is aggression. And the administration says nothing about the siege, about the occupation, about our difficulties."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/13/international/middleeast/13MIDE.html