Israeli and Palestinian Officials Meet
Palestinian officials said the meeting, between Israeli military officials and a leading Palestinian official, Saeb Erekat, took place at the Beit El military base north of Ramallah, the West Bank site of Mr. Arafat's battered headquarters.

Mr. Erekat, who later briefed Mr. Arafat at his compound, told Reuters in a telephone call that Mr. Arafat had rejected Israeli demands to present a list naming all the people holed up with him in his West Bank headquarters.

The United Nations Security Council was to meet today to discuss the siege in the face of widespread opposition voiced by European and Arab countries and criticism by the United States.

The demonstrations started Saturday night and continued into the early of Sunday morning in support of Mr. Arafat, defying Israel's efforts to leave him powerless. The four Palestinians were killed by troops trying to enforce curfews ignored by protesters.

On Sunday evening, the Israeli Army said it was ceasing demolition work around Mr. Arafat's headquarters. Most of the buildings that were not destroyed in earlier raids have been razed in the last four days.

But the building in which Mr. Arafat and about 200 other Palestinians were cooped up remained under a tight military siege, ringed with barbed wire and Israeli troops. From within Mr. Arafat's headquarters, his aide, Nabil Aburdeineh, said on Sunday that the Israelis had ceased demolition only because they had finished destroying the rest of the compound.

Mr. Aburdeineh said the Israeli Army put constant psychological pressure on the men inside. Water pipes to the building were severed, he said. The Israelis allowed Palestinians to repair them, only to sever them again. The Israelis also promised to allow a food delivery, but it never arrived, Mr. Aburdeineh said. The army also removed all the building's air conditioners.

On Saturday evening, the Israelis informed the trapped Palestinians that they intended to blow up an adjacent building, warned that the explosion could collapse Mr. Arafat's building and told the besieged men to leave. They refused, and the army apparently abandoned its plan.

An army spokesman, however, said that demolition work was halted only "for the moment," and that the siege remained in force.

In the middle of the night on Saturday, heeding calls from Fatah, Mr. Arafat's movement, and from mullahs in the mosques, more than a thousand Palestinian men, women and children marched onto Ramallah's central Manara Square. They defied Israeli demands to disperse and chanted, "We will give our soul and blood for Arafat!"

Similar protests were reported in Gaza City and in the West Bank in Qalqilya, Tulkarm, Hebron, Tubas, Salfit, Bethlehem and Jericho. It was the first mass wave of support for Mr. Arafat in months. Two protesters were shot dead in Ramallah, one in Tulkarm and one in Nablus.

The protests confirmed the warnings of some Israeli politicians and columnists that the assault on Mr. Arafat would revive his standing among Palestinians after a period in which, led by legislators, they had begun to challenge his power and to demand that he hand executive powers over to a prime minister.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/23/international/middleeast/23CND-MIDE.html