Cease-Fire Is Called on Eve of Jewish New Year

Israeli officials on Monday played down a statement by Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat that he has ordered his forces to observe a cease-fire urged on both sides by the United States.

In greetings he sent to Israelis for the Jewish New Year, Arafat said he had issued “strong and clear instructions for a full commitment to a cease-fire.” He called on the Israeli government to “reply to this message of peace and take the decisions to cease fire too.” The statement was later run by the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA.

But fighting raged in the West Bank and Gaza Strip throughout the day and into the night, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told interviewers that he did not believe Arafat would stop the fighting.

On Sunday, Sharon said he would allow his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to hold talks with Arafat only if the Palestinian leader imposed a cease-fire that held for 48 hours.

Israelis began observing the two-day holiday for the Jewish New Year on Monday evening under heavy guard and the fear that a new war could break out as a result of last week’s terror attacks on the United States. Armed police and troops have been deployed outside synagogues across the nation. Worried that any U.S. retaliation might drag Israel into the fighting, many Israelis picked up new gas masks or had their old ones checked by authorities.

The Bush administration is pressuring both Israel and the Palestinians to stop the fighting that has gone on here for nearly a year and cost about 800 lives, most of them Palestinian. Eager to bring Arab states into its broad coalition against international terrorism, the administration has asked Sharon to reopen negotiations with the Palestinians that ended when he was elected prime minister in February.

Sharon has said that Israel is not prepared to pay a political price to make it easier for Arab states to join the U.S. fight against Islamic terrorist organizations. His condition for opening negotiations with the Palestinians has always been a complete cessation of attacks on Israelis.

Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin said Arafat’s New Year’s greetings had reached the government only through the news media. Neither the prime minister’s office nor the Foreign Ministry had actually received Arafat’s statement, he said Monday night.

“He’s issuing statements through the media while people are continuing to shoot. Our intelligence service says that he hasn’t issued orders to his people to cease fire,” Gissin said. “There’s been some reduction in the level of violence, but he has to pass a test and stop the shooting.”

Palestinian officials accuse Sharon of seeking to sabotage the cease-fire effort by continuing to enter Palestinian-controlled territory and carrying out retaliatory strikes for Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

A Palestinian was killed in Gaza and 15 were wounded, including five boys, during Monday’s fighting, Palestinian sources reported. Gun battles began before dawn in the Gazan town of Rafah on the Israeli-Egyptian border. Palestinians said a mentally handicapped man who blundered into the shootout between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli troops was killed. The Israeli army said three of its soldiers were slightly wounded.

Later in the day, five children were wounded as they walked home from school. One of them, a 12-year-old, was said to be in critical condition in a Gazan hospital. The army said that hundreds of Palestinians threw stones and firebombs at soldiers near Netzarim, a Jewish settlement in Gaza.

Gun battles also raged in Beitunia, a village on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Ramallah, for at least two hours Monday. Palestinian sources said Israeli tanks fired more than a dozen shells into neighborhoods, hitting the yard of a kindergarten and forcing the evacuation of 150 children by ambulance. An army spokeswoman said that only “several” tank shells were fired at the village after Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a nearby army base and seriously injured one soldier.

Palestinians said that 12 people were injured in Beitunia before the gunfire stopped, some of them patrons of a coffee shop that was hit by a tank shell, others worshipers who were praying in a mosque when it was hit. Several homes reportedly were damaged. The army said it had received no reports of damage to homes, shops or schools.