Arafat Tells Militants to End Battle

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat called on his people to halt all attacks on Israelis, including suicide bombings, in a speech Sunday delivered amid mounting pressure on him to crush Islamic militant groups or face his regime’s destruction.

The speech--delivered in Arabic on Voice of Palestine Television--was the sort that Israel, the Bush administration and the European Union have been pressing Arafat to make for months. But it may have offered too little, too late to reverse the Israeli government’s declaration last week that Arafat is “irrelevant” or to stop Israel’s wide-ranging military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the lone dove in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government, said Israel “cannot judge by words or speeches. We have to try to follow the coming few days--to see what’s being done, not just what’s being said.”

Arafat’s speech also drew criticism from some Palestinians. Hassan Yusef, a spokesman for the Islamic militant group Hamas in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said he didn’t know “to whom Arafat was speaking” when he called for an end to attacks on Israelis “because we the Palestinian people, who are exposed to the atrocities of the Israeli aggression, have the right to defend ourselves.”

Israeli Transportation Minister Ephraim Sneh called some aspects of the speech “positive,” but said it remained to be seen whether “this important speech was just another cluster of declarations.”

Israel is demanding that Arafat dismantle the military branches of Hamas and of Islamic Jihad, another militant group, which have gained popularity among Palestinians during more than 14 months of bloodshed for their willingness to attack Israelis. After a spate of deadly assaults in Israel and the West Bank this month, Israel’s Security Cabinet decided last week to sever ties with Arafat and the Palestinian Authority and hunt down militants itself.

Since then, the air force has bombed and rocketed Palestinian police facilities and Arafat’s presidential compound in Gaza. The Israeli military also has raided Palestinian towns and villages, blowing up homes of suspected militants, making dozens of arrests and engaging in gun battles that have killed at least 16 Palestinians.

The upsurge in violence led the Bush administration to recall its Middle East envoy, retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, to Washington on Saturday for consultations.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell blamed Zinni’s inability to secure a cease-fire on both the Israelis and the Palestinians, but he singled out Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for specific criticism in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”

“Zinni went to help the parties, but they were not ready . . . to be helped at this point,” Powell said. “Hamas, a terrorist organization, started killing innocent civilians with car bombs in Jerusalem, Haifa and elsewhere. And they attacked this process--they attacked innocent Israelis.

“But even more fundamentally and troubling,” Powell continued, “they attacked Yasser Arafat and his authority to lead the Palestinian people toward a cease-fire and a process of peace.”

Powell added, however, that Zinni’s mission is not over.

“The Zinni mission has not failed,” he said. “The parties have failed.”

Arafat chose the start of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, to make the rare address to his people. He called on Sharon to halt what he termed the prime minister’s “brutal” war against the Palestinian people and their elected government. He urged the Israeli people to understand that only negotiations will resolve their conflict with the Palestinians.

But the bulk of the speech was addressed to his own people and to the militants. Arafat praised the Palestinians for enduring more than a year of unequal conflict with Israel. But he demanded an end to armed attacks and recognition of his government as the only authority in Palestinian-controlled areas. He also called for an end to mortar attacks on Israeli settlements.

His remarks came after Palestinian security forces closed more than two dozen political and charitable offices associated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad over the weekend. Security men wearing ski masks to hide their identities carried away computers and filing cabinets in the raids and changed or sealed the locks on office doors.

“I today reiterate [a call for] the complete and immediate cessation of all military activities,” Arafat said. “I renew the call to completely halt any activities, especially suicide attacks, which we have condemned and always condemned.”

Arafat also said he was committed to enforcing a cease-fire.

“We will punish all the planners and executors . . . and we will hunt down the violators,” he said. “In this complicated conflict . . . we must not allow anyone to shake the credibility of the [Palestinian] leadership and its decisions.”

The recent suicide attacks, Arafat said, gave Sharon a “pretext” for staging raids deep inside Palestinian territory and stepping up the targeted killings of Palestinian militants.

However, Arafat did not explicitly call for an end to the Palestinian revolt against Israel’s military presence in the West Bank and Gaza. He told his people that his goal is still to establish a Palestinian state in areas Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War, including East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

The Palestinian leader said the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States drastically altered world politics. Clad in his familiar dress fatigues, Arafat said he would not allow the Palestinian struggle for an independent state to be classified as a terrorist war.

Speaking on CNN immediately after Arafat’s speech, Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin said he was skeptical that the Palestinian leader would back up his words with deeds.

“He needs to convince the one constituency that he lost in the past 14 months, the Israeli public,” Gissin said.

Hamas spokesman Yusef said the organization realizes “the pressure Arafat is under,” but he rejected the Palestinian leader’s call for Israel to return to a political dialogue.

“The intifada came because of the failure of the dialogue that was held for 10 barren years with the Israelis,” Yusef said.

Also in Ramallah, Abdul Jawad Saleh, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and a frequent critic of Arafat, said the speech was aimed at appeasing the United States and Israel and “ignores Palestinian interests.”

“This brings us back to square one,” Saleh said in a telephone interview. “Arafat has distanced himself from the Palestinian street, as if he doesn’t care anymore for the welfare of the Palestinian people.”

Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath characterized the address as a clear call for a return to political negotiations and said that Israel should suspend its military raids into Palestinian-controlled territory so that Palestinian security forces can round up militants.