Militia Chief Survives Israeli Missile Attack

Israeli missiles slammed into a convoy Saturday in which Marwan Barghouti, a popular Palestinian leader, was traveling in the West Bank city of Ramallah. One car was destroyed and a security official was injured, but Barghouti escaped unharmed.

Palestinians denounced the attack as an attempt to assassinate Barghouti, head of the Fatah militia in the West Bank, saying the incident indicated that Israel is prepared to target anyone in the Palestinian leadership.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his government “are declaring this war against everybody, the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people,” said Yasser Abed-Rabbo, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of information.

The Israeli army offered no comment, but security sources insisted that it was the injured man, Muhannad abu Halaweh, a member of the Force 17 Palestinian presidential guard, who was the target. He received burns on his face and hands.

Barghouti told reporters that he and several others had just finished a meeting and were driving away from a downtown Ramallah building when the first missile whizzed by without hitting any car. Security officials driving in a car behind Barghouti’s ran for cover as a second missile struck their car, reducing it to twisted steel and broken glass.

“This is a very severe escalation, and the Arab world is required to defend those who defend its honor,” Barghouti said. “Israel should know that it will pay a very severe price. With a Sharon government, one must fight. There is no room for negotiations with it.”

Barghouti is one of the few Palestinian Authority officials who enjoys widespread popular support. A student leader during the first intifada, or uprising, against Israeli military rule in the late 1980s, he rose through the ranks to become one of the most powerful leaders of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Short, pudgy and mustached, Barghouti is particularly respected by young people, who regard him as an uncorrupted fighter for the establishment of a Palestinian state. His militancy and high profile have at times strained relations between him and Arafat, now president of the Palestinian Authority.

Saturday’s strike, which Palestinian eyewitnesses said they believed came from a tank positioned at a nearby Jewish settlement, occurred despite strong international condemnation of Israel’s policy of so-called targeted killings of Palestinians--and just four days after an Israeli missile strike on the West Bank office of a militant Islamic movement brought blistering criticism from the Bush administration.

It also took place only two days after Vice President Dick Cheney caused an uproar in the Arab world with comments he made in a Fox Television interview Thursday that seemed to partially condone the Israeli killings. Palestinians say that Israel has slain 60 people in targeted attacks since peace talks broke down and fighting erupted between Israelis and Palestinians last September. Human rights organizations have condemned the killings as extrajudicial and illegal under international law.

Israel has said it has no choice but to carry out the attacks, often in Palestinian-controlled territory, because the Palestinian Authority has refused to arrest militants who are mounting almost daily assaults on Israeli civilians and troops both inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Security sources said Saturday that Abu Halaweh was implicated in attacks in which eight Israelis were killed, including Binyamin Kahane, a settler who was the son of the late far-right extremist rabbi Meir Kahane. The younger Kahane and his wife, Talia, were killed in a drive-by shooting in the West Bank in December.

Until last week, Israel’s attacks on targeted militants had almost always been aimed exclusively at gunmen and bombers, although innocent passersby were sometimes killed and wounded. On Tuesday, however, Israel killed eight Palestinians--including two senior officials of the Hamas Islamic movement and two children--when it fired missiles into an office in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Those killings brought a harsh response from the State Department. But in his Fox interview, Cheney said that “in Israel, what they’ve done, of course, over the years, occasionally, in an effort to preempt terrorist activities, is to go after the terrorists. And in some cases, I suppose, by their lights, it is justified.

“If you’ve got an organization that has plotted or is plotting some kind of suicide bomber attack, for example, and they have hard evidence of who it is and where they’re located, I think there’s some justification in their trying to protect themselves by preempting,” he said.

The next day, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer insisted that there are no differences on the issue among President Bush, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Fleischer told reporters that “all are in unison on the need to stop the violence.” What Cheney “was reflecting on,” Fleischer said, “is how both parties see justification in the actions they take.”

But the London-published Al Hayat, highly respected in the Arab world as an independent newspaper, said Cheney’s comments illustrated that there are two views in the administration, “one that opposes Israel’s assassination policy and one that supports it. Colin Powell seems to oppose it while Dick Cheney seems to support it.”

Violence continued to flare elsewhere in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, with Israeli tanks and bulldozers rumbling into Palestinian territory in Gaza to destroy a police station after a mortar shell injured an Israeli man and a boy in a nearby settlement. A gun battle erupted between Palestinians and Israeli troops during the incursion, but no injuries were reported.

Early today, both sides said, Israeli helicopters fired rockets at Palestinian police headquarters in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The Israeli military said Palestinians had fired mortars at Jewish settlements and Israeli army outposts.

The commander of Palestinian national security in Rafah, Col. Fawzi Zaqouk, said three missiles hit his office, causing considerable damage but no casualties.

Saturday night, the sound of tank fire and machine guns rang out through southern Jerusalem as Israel opened fire on the West Bank towns of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahur and El Khader after gunmen reportedly shot at Gilo, a Jewish community on the outskirts of Jerusalem that was built on land Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War. An Israeli woman reportedly was injured by shrapnel.