Monday, November 18, 2002

Arafat Slams Sharon Over Hebron Corridor Plan

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat voiced alarm on Monday at Israel's plan to tighten its grip on Hebron by building corridors for Jewish settlers that would snake through the West Bank city.


``This is a big crime,'' Arafat said about the proposal, raised by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon after Palestinian gunmen killed 12 soldiers and security men on Friday on an open route settlers use to reach a holy site in the city center.

Building walled-in passages could entail razing Palestinian homes and heighten tensions, threatening U.S. efforts to keep the region calm as Washington prepares for possible war on Iraq.

In another sign that Sharon would make security his first line of offence with a Likud party election looming against hawkish Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli forces attacked a Palestinian security agency's headquarters in Gaza.

Israel said it found and destroyed an explosives factory in the Palestinian Preventive Security Service building it attacked with tanks and helicopters. Palestinian officials denied weapons were being made there.

Israeli officials said Sharon's Hebron plan, still in drafting stages, involved creating a secure ``corridor'' linking the Tomb of the Patriarchs -- holy to both Muslims and Jews -- and settler enclaves inside the volatile city to the adjacent settlement of Kiryat Arba, where Friday's ambush took place.

Speaking to reporters at his battered West Bank compound, Arafat said Israel was out to ``Judaise'' Hebron, a biblical city divided into Palestinian- and Israeli-controlled sectors under a 1997 interim peace deal Netanyahu signed as prime minister. About 450 Jewish settlers, most armed and among the most militant in the West Bank, live amid about 130,000 Palestinians in Hebron, about 25 miles south of Jerusalem.

Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres slammed Sharon's security blueprint for Hebron, whose Palestinian sector was reoccupied by Israeli forces after the ambush.

``Making a 'sleeve' will necessitate the deployment of more soldiers to protect it, because the sleeve alone will not keep (the settlers) safe and will only increase friction,'' Peres, of the center-left Labor Party, told Israel Radio.

In Gaza City, the Israeli army moved against the headquarters of the Preventive Security Service.

Backed by helicopters and about 30 tanks, soldiers blew up at least four buildings including the former office of Mohammed Dahlan, the former preventive security chief in Gaza, and one used by his successor, Rashid Abu Shbak, security sources said.

Medics said three Palestinian security men were wounded before Israeli troops pulled out before dawn.

``We found a laboratory and a workshop inside the headquarters, where they made mortars, mortar bombs, rifle-mounted grenades and rocket-propelled grenades,'' said Brigadier Yisrael Ziv, the Israeli army's division commander.

``The weapons were supplied on a large scale to terrorist organizations, including Islamic Jihad,'' he told Reuters.

Denying this, Abu Shbak said: ``Every time they bomb a building, a house or a metal foundry they claim it was used to manufacture weapons.''

Palestinian cabinet minister and chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said Israel was out ``to destroy the peace process, the Palestinian Authority and to maintain the Israeli occupation.''
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html

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