Israel Issues Ultimatum After Minister’s Slaying

Israel issued an ultimatum to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat today after Palestinian gunmen assassinated a far-right member of the Israeli Cabinet: Turn over the shooters and those who sent them, or face a military onslaught.

Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, 75, was gunned down Wednesday at an East Jerusalem hotel in the first Palestinian assassination of an Israeli government official. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a militant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, claimed responsibility, and a spokesman said the killing was only the first in a series of planned attacks on Israelis.

Zeevi, a former general, gained political notoriety more than a decade ago by advocating the mass expulsion of Arabs from Israeli-controlled territory. His assassination plunged U.S. peacemaking efforts into crisis as Israel all but declared war on the Palestinian Authority.

Arafat condemned the killing and promised that the perpetrators would be punished. But Israeli political leaders scornfully dismissed his condemnation.

The Israeli Cabinet issued its ultimatum to Arafat and the Palestinian Authority after midnight, warning, “If they do not meet these demands, Israel will have no choice but to view the Palestinian Authority as a terrorist-supporting entity and act against it accordingly.”

The statement said that the government will “wage a war to the quick” against the PFLP.

The Bush administration condemned the assassination but urged Israel to continue negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

“This despicable act is further evidence of the need to fight terrorism,” White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said in a written statement as President Bush landed at Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento on his way to a summit in China.

Zeevi’s death shocked a nation that thought it had seen it all.

“It is another one of those mornings that makes you crazy and breaks your heart,” said Yossi Sarid, leader of the left-wing opposition in the Knesset, as the Israeli parliament is known. He and Zeevi could not have been further apart politically, Sarid said, but “I am utterly devastated by this murder.”

Although Zeevi’s political beliefs were anathema to much of the Israeli political spectrum, he was a hero of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, a respected general and a well-liked lawmaker. Even those who despised his calls to “voluntarily transfer” Arabs from Israeli-controlled territory acknowledged his passionate love for the land of Israel.

His assassination had the effect of at least temporarily pulling together the fractious Knesset.

Politicians of the left and right alike demanded that Arafat immediately apprehend Zeevi’s killers and crack down on other militants. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly advised the government to declare war on the Palestinian Authority unless it handed over Zeevi’s killers within 48 hours.

Avigdor Lieberman, who with Zeevi had led their seven-member National Union bloc out of the government Monday because they feared that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had chosen to pursue a diplomatic solution with the Palestinians, rejoined the government.

Grim-faced, Sharon told a special session of the Knesset that he held Arafat accountable for Zeevi’s death.

“The full responsibility falls squarely on Arafat, as someone who has controlled, and continues to control, terrorism, and as someone who has not--to this day--taken even one serious step to prevent terrorism,” Sharon said.

In the Gaza Strip, special U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen read Arafat’s terse condemnation of the assassination after meeting with the Palestinian leader. Calling the situation extraordinarily grave, Roed-Larsen said that the time had come to put an end to a conflict “characterized by the logic of a vendetta and the attempts to wash blood with blood. It has to stop.”

But in a statement issued shortly after Zeevi was shot at least twice outside his East Jerusalem hotel room, a defiant PFLP said it had killed him to avenge the death of its leader, Mustafa Zibri, and promised more to come. Zibri, more commonly called Abu Ali Mustafa, was killed Aug. 27 in an Israeli rocket attack on his office in the West Bank.

“The Israeli government, by killing Abu Ali Mustafa, has opened the gates of hell on itself, and now the fire is approaching it,” PFLP spokesman Ali Jaradat said Wednesday. Jaradat reportedly was later arrested by the Palestinian Authority in connection with Zeevi’s assassination.

Israel has targeted dozens of Palestinian militants since fighting erupted here in September 2000, calling the attacks acts of self-defense. Much of the international community condemns the attacks as extrajudicial killings, and the United States has urged Israel to stop them.

The Israeli government suspended the practice last month, when both sides announced that they would observe a cease-fire, but resumed it Sunday, when an Israeli sniper killed a leader of the Islamic movement Hamas. Two more Hamas militants have since died in mysterious explosions that the Palestinians said were carried out by Israeli agents. Israel has said it knows nothing about those killings.

In his role as a member of the powerful Security Cabinet, Zeevi advocated an ever-harsher response to Palestinian attacks.

Zeevi lived on Israel’s coastal plain near Tel Aviv but routinely stayed at the East Jerusalem Hyatt Regency Hotel with his wife, Yael, when the Knesset was in session. After the couple ate breakfast together Wednesday morning, Zeevi returned to their eighth-floor room alone for a scheduled telephone interview.

As was his custom, he was unaccompanied by bodyguards. The minister often carried a gun but was unarmed Wednesday morning, according to police. He was gunned down outside his room by one or more assailants who lay in wait, police said. The assassins apparently used guns equipped with silencers, because no one reported hearing shots.

“I was taking a shower, and I heard what seemed like something falling,” said David Hocking, an evangelical minister from Tustin, Calif. Hocking, 60, is staying at the hotel with a group of Christian pilgrims. Shortly before 7 a.m., he heard hysterical screaming and cracked his door open to see Zeevi “lying there, 30 feet down the hall. Blood was all over, and his wife was kneeling over him, screaming uncontrollably.”

Hocking threw on pants and a shirt and ran to help. As he tried to calm Yael Zeevi, a hotel employee and Janice Hamilton, a nurse from Salinas, Calif., who is a member of Hocking’s group, administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

“It was a horrible sight,” he said. “He seemed dead to me. It was obvious that he had been shot straight to the head and to the face.” Hocking said he noticed a small bullet casing next to the body and bent to pick it up. Yael Zeevi, he said, snatched it.

Within minutes, an Israeli emergency medical team arrived on the scene, along with dozens of police officers, including sharpshooters who took up positions on the hotel’s roof. Built on the line between East and West Jerusalem, the Hyatt employs both Palestinians and Jews on its 250-strong staff. All of those on duty Wednesday morning were detained and questioned by police for hours.

Zeevi was clinically dead upon his arrival at nearby Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, according to a hospital spokesman, but a team of senior physicians who met the ambulance that transported him cracked his chest open and massaged his heart in a desperate attempt to resuscitate him. He was declared dead at 10 a.m.

Reporters and some politicians criticized the General Security Service, Israel’s secret police, for failing to insist that Zeevi accept a bodyguard, and for failing to do more to secure the Hyatt, where several Israeli lawmakers routinely stay when the Knesset is in session.

In a rare statement, the security service said it was forming a commission of inquiry into the shooting and would do its utmost to find Zeevi’s killers.

After a meeting of senior ministers and security officials, the government canceled steps taken in recent days to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and suspended political contacts with the Palestinians. Troops and tanks reimposed a blockade of Ramallah and put up checkpoints and roadblocks across the West Bank. Witnesses said tanks were moving toward Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah, although he was not there. No one was injured when a few shells were reportedly fired in the area.

Before dawn today, Israeli tanks and troops thrust into Palestinian-ruled territory on the outskirts of Jenin. Residents said there were no sounds of battle.

Zeevi’s body will lie in state outside the Knesset this morning. Six generals are scheduled to carry his coffin to his grave in the military section of Jerusalem’s Mt. Herzl cemetery. He will be buried not far from his comrade in arms, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was gunned down in November 1995 by a Jewish assassin opposed to Israel’s peace accords with the Palestinians.

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Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.