Israel Pounds Palestinian Authority

Israeli forces bore down on Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority on Thursday, moving armor to within easy shooting range of his headquarters as fighter aircraft pounded this and other Palestinian cities late into the night.

Armored Israeli bulldozers demolished Palestinian television and radio transmission facilities in a bid to silence the Voice of Palestine. Troops occupied towns across the West Bank and searched Palestinian homes. Israeli soldiers also seized the home and family of a leading Palestinian militia commander and Arafat lieutenant here in Ramallah. Eight Palestinians were reported killed in multiple Israeli operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The widening offensive came after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cut off all ties with Arafat and declared him “irrelevant” following a Palestinian ambush Wednesday that killed 10 Jewish settlers.

Potentially irrelevant, as well, was the mission of U.S. envoy Anthony C. Zinni, who arrived nearly three weeks ago to try to broker a cease-fire. U.S. officials are expected to decide within the next 24 to 48 hours how to proceed with the peace effort.

Israel, which accuses Arafat of failing to rein in terrorists, says the time for talking is over. Dore Gold, a senior advisor to Sharon, said Thursday that Israel no longer felt bound by the landmark 1993 Oslo accords that established the Palestinian Authority and set in motion the peace process that has framed Israeli-Palestinian relations ever since.

As long as Arafat remains in power, Gold said, negotiations are out of the question. Israel instead will act militarily in what he called the defense of its citizens.

“We are as close as we’ve ever been to a full military confrontation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority,” U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said in Jerusalem.

At the United Nations, the Security Council held an unscheduled meeting Thursday night to discuss the escalating confrontation between the two sides.

The closed-door “consultations” on the Middle East, which are scheduled to resume today, were convened at the request of the U.N.’s Arab bloc, led by Egypt, which expressed alarm at Israel’s decision Wednesday to break relations with Arafat.

A draft resolution submitted to the Security Council with Arab backing called for an outside “monitoring mechanism” to oversee compliance with cease-fire steps recommended by former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell’s fact-finding committee earlier this year. Israel has consistently opposed the introduction of foreign observers into the region.

Here in Ramallah, the business and government center for the Palestinian West Bank, Israeli tanks entered from three directions, taking up position on a muddy field about 400 feet from Arafat’s compound, where he has been holed up for days. The guns on the turrets of two tanks were trained on the compound.

A short distance away, tanks, armored personnel carriers and bulldozers methodically demolished the studios of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corp. Two three-story yellow stucco towers collapsed in a mound of rubble. Soldiers then lay dynamite charges at the base of a 300-foot transmitting tower dominating the Ramallah skyline. Two huge blasts--and the tower fell, as if in slow motion, to the ground.

The actions knocked the Voice of Palestine off the air. Local FM stations picked up the signal and rebroadcast it, but over a greatly reduced range. Both the studios and the tower were built in the 1930s.

Israel has frequently accused Palestinian radio and television broadcasters of inflaming their public. But Thursday’s demolition also targeted symbols of Arafat’s power and seemed aimed at further diminishing his image and his authority in the eyes of his public.

The soldiers worked unencumbered by the fact that they were standing in the middle of Palestinian-controlled territory. A small group of youths gathered to watch, along with a couple of politicians and a few journalists. At one point, the soldiers fired three or four smoke grenades at those interviewing the chairman of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corp. One soldier fired a smoke grenade directly into the back of a photographer.

“It’s a game of cat and mouse,” said Radwan abu Ayash, the broadcasting chairman. “We have to play Mighty Mouse.”

Abu Ayash said the pressure on Arafat will topple him “only in Sharon’s dreams.”

But another spectator, Azmi Ash-Shuaybi, a Palestinian legislator from a small leftist party, disagreed. “I think Arafat is finished from a Palestinian viewpoint,” Ash-Shuaybi said. “He has a place in history, and as a historical leader we will always respect him. But in practical terms, we need a new type of leadership.”

The new leaders are needed mostly to embark on what Ash-Shuaybi said would be a guerrilla war to fight Israel as Sharon “closes all the doors” to a political resolution.

Elsewhere in Ramallah, Israeli soldiers who moved in overnight--covered by a hail of shelling but little, if any, return fire--took up positions in Palestinian Authority offices, where they could be seen carting in boxes of jelly-filled Hanukkah doughnuts.

In the affluent Al Tireh neighborhood of Ramallah, Israeli troops took over the apartment of leading Palestinian militia commander Marwan Barghouti. He was not present when about 30 soldiers entered the seven-story building.

His family--wife, brother and four children ages 10 to 16--told reporters that they were being held against their will; an army spokesman insisted that they were free to go. Four tanks and four armored personnel carriers were arrayed on the streets surrounding the building.

The brother, Hisham Barghouti, leaned out of the window of the third-floor apartment and told reporters below that the soldiers had taken over the TV room and living room and placed the family in the bedroom. “They are looking for Marwan, what do you think?” he said. Barghouti said he believed that the soldiers thought that keeping the family would entice the militia commander to return and surrender. But it wasn’t going to work, he said.

If the intifada has a celebrity, it is Marwan Barghouti, who frequently finds his way to the front of television cameras and commands militias accused by the Sharon government of having attacked Israelis.

Reached by telephone at an undisclosed location, Barghouti said the attack on his home and the fright given his wife were a “crime.” “They want to destroy everything,” he said of the Israelis.

The Israeli army spokesman said the building was taken for the strategic vista it offers. A house across the street was occupied, apparently for the same reason. That house belongs to the Housari family of Christian Arabs; stuck inside were a pregnant woman, a 3-year-old child and two other adults.

Enforcing Israel’s new decision to launch wider attacks on Arafat’s administration, helicopter gunships and F-16 warplanes hit Palestinian targets throughout the day and into the night. Helicopters fired missiles Thursday evening into an abandoned police station in crowded downtown Ramallah; into at least four security bases in Gaza City; and into Arafat’s offices in the West Bank town of Jenin. At least eight Palestinians were reported killed, including four during a raid early today on the West Bank village of Salfit, and on Thursday in Gaza, one who Israel said was carrying a bomb. Israeli fire at a police post in Gaza also damaged a mosque where Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin was praying, Palestinian and Israeli officials said.

The Israeli government said the new offensive is a fight to crush terrorism. However, nearly all the targets belonged to the Palestinian Authority, not the Islamic radicals responsible for a recent wave of suicide bombings in Israel.

Shimon Peres, Israel’s dovish foreign minister, demanded that the army explain the targeting and come up with selections from sites of the radical Islamic movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Ten funerals were held in four Israeli towns, meanwhile, for victims from Wednesday evening’s bus ambush outside a Jewish settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus. Nineteen victims remained hospitalized.

Three members of one family--Yakov Tsarfatis, 64, and his two sons, David and Hanan--were buried in Kfar Sava. A 40-year-old father of nine and a 13-year-old also were among the dead.

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Zinni and U.S. Ambassador Daniel Kertzer were meeting with Sharon on Thursday night to probe his reasons for cutting off contact with the Palestinian leader.

The U.S., he added, still recognizes Arafat as the elected leader of the Palestinian Authority and an essential player in the peace process.

Powell also said the Bush administration will not give up its efforts to get the two parties to negotiate a cease-fire and eventually get back to peace talks.

Zinni’s mission has been star-crossed from the start. More than 100 people have been killed since his arrival.

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Times staff writer Robin Wright in Washington and William Orme at the United Nations contributed to this report.