Israel Broadens Offensive as 2 Suicide Attacks Kill 17

Steadfast enemies for more than two decades, Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat vowed a fight to the finish as fresh carnage Sunday plunged this region deeper into warfare.

Israel widened its military offensive in the Palestinian territories, sending ground forces into two more West Bank cities, and Palestinian suicide bombers launched their fourth and fifth attacks in five days, killing 17 people and wounding dozens.

One blast devastated a restaurant in the northern Israeli port of Haifa where Israeli Arabs and Jews mixed freely, killing the attacker and 15 others and injuring as many as 41. In the second incident, in the Jewish settlement of Efrat in the West Bank, the assailant blew himself up, wounding four medics.

As Israeli forces tightened their harsh siege on Arafat and Ramallah, the city that is the Palestinian Authority president’s power base, the Israeli government ordered all journalists to leave the area. Some were ordered to submit their reports to a military censor.

In a televised address to his despondent nation, Sharon branded Arafat “an enemy of the entire free world” who must be “uprooted” along with the terrorism network that the Israeli prime minister insists Arafat directs.

“We must fight against this terrorism, fight with no compromise, pull up these wild plants by the roots, smash their infrastructure, because there is no compromise with terrorism,” said a grim-faced Sharon, his brow deeply furrowed.

He told Israelis that they are fighting a war for their existence but offered no new ideas for resolving the conflict. Instead, he repeated a simple, blunt justification for Israel’s thrust into the West Bank. The Jewish state, he said, is at war against “terrorism”--a word he used about 15 times in his four minutes on the air.

Arafat, taking advantage of visiting foreign activists who had sneaked past Israeli tanks into his compound, announced to the world that he would never surrender.

“Victory will be here sooner than expected, God willing,” Arafat said, hugging his visitors and mugging for TV cameras.

Israel began laying siege to Ramallah on Friday after a suicide bombing on the first night of Passover killed 23 people in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya.

The military incursion was intended as a campaign to eliminate terrorism, but instead new bombings have followed almost every day. Israel, ignoring international calls for restraint, apparently planned to replicate the Ramallah siege in other West Bank towns as part of a sweeping operation.

Tanks moved into the West Bank town of Kalkilya late Sunday, electricity was cut and gun battles could be heard, residents said. Tanks also were entering Bethlehem early today, witnesses said. The army might have been waiting until Easter was over before invading the largely Christian area.

Witnesses said tanks moved to within 500 feet of the Church of the Nativity, the traditional birthplace of Jesus. Also early today, tanks roared into the village of Khader, just south of Bethlehem.

In Ramallah on Sunday, Israeli troops rounded up dozens of Palestinian men and spent a third day conducting intensive house-to-house searches. Troops occupied homes, businesses and public buildings, including the Chamber of Commerce.

Tanks and armored troop transports plied the streets, chopping the pavement, flattening cars that got in the way and toppling light posts and traffic signs. The air was full of dust and the smell of burning rubber.

Palestinians Trapped in Their Homes

The siege has trapped tens of thousands of Palestinians in their homes. Few dare emerge into the streets for fear of being shot.

In the kind of scene that was repeated throughout central Ramallah, Israeli troops were inspecting the faded home of an elderly man Sunday. In the back garden, about 20 men in civilian clothes could be seen, seated or squatting on the ground, their hands bound by plastic handcuffs, with soldiers standing guard. An officer said the men were fighters who had used the home to hide their weapons.

The goal of the Ramallah operation, Sharon has said, is not to kill Arafat but to isolate him. To further tighten the noose, Israeli troops took cars belonging to Palestinian residents and laid them on their sides, bumper to bumper, across almost every street leading to Arafat’s compound.

Consequently, Sharon’s government was livid Sunday when a group of international peace activists, accompanied by journalists, marched past the tanks surrounding Arafat’s headquarters and strolled in to see the Palestinian leader.

The activists took water and a small amount of food but, most important, gave Arafat a platform. About 30 of them said they planned to stay in the compound to serve as a human shield for him. Ten of the activists, along with three Palestinian ambulance medics, were arrested later by Israeli soldiers and taken to a nearby base, a member of the group said.

After Arafat appeared on television, the Israeli army and government ordered foreign journalists to leave Ramallah or risk being expelled by force. The army declared the area a closed military zone, a designation that means off limits but is enforced spottily.

U.S. Reporter Shot in the Shoulder

Also Sunday, an American journalist, Anthony Shadid, was shot in the shoulder a short time after leaving the compound.

Shadid, a Washington-based reporter for the Boston Globe, was walking away from Arafat’s compound and toward a hotel through an area controlled by Israeli soldiers. Army medics treated him, then summoned a Palestinian ambulance, which took him to the private Arab Care Hospital.

The army said it was investigating the shooting.

When Western reporters went to the hospital to check on Shadid, they were denied entry by soldiers who had occupied the first floor.

Witnesses said the troops were searching the hospital rooms while confining doctors and nurses to certain floors. It was the second time in two days that the hospital had been raided.

At the larger, state-run Ramallah Hospital, staffers defied the tanks. When the machines rolled into the emergency driveway, dozens of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel staged a sit-in, vowing that the troops would enterthe hospital “over our dead bodies,” said cardiologist Dr. Mohammed Batrawi.

The army eventually compromised with the hospital management, agreeing to a perimeter check instead of a more thorough search after the hospital director gave assurances that no armed men were inside.

Army Believes Terrorists to Be Hiding in Hospital

There were reports in the evening, however, that the hospital had been raided.

An army spokesman said Sunday that the army believed that numerous “wanted terrorists” were hiding in hospitals.

Palestinian security officials said about 30 police officers were captured by Israeli troops and trapped in a downtown office building.

Col. Jibril Rajoub, security chief for the West Bank, told Al Jazeera television that the men had been trying to surrender when troops opened fire.

The army gave a different account, saying its forces encountered an armed Palestinian with explosives strapped to his body at the building. They killed him and then engaged in a gun battle with other armed men at the site, the army said.

Neither report could be independently verified.

For Sharon and Arafat, the current showdown is very personal.

Sharon, 74, and Arafat, 72, have fought for each other’s mutual destruction for years.

Sharon launched Israel’s highly controversial invasion of Lebanon in 1982 in pursuit of Arafat, who commanded the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut. The Israeli general launched a “war on terrorism” and lay siege to Arafat in his headquarters.

But Arafat eventually was able to leave with thousands of men, regroup and live to fight another day.

Both men act today as though they are reliving those times, obsessed with an old vendetta.

“For him [Sharon], the score is still unsettled from then, waiting to be closed,” commentator Nahum Barnea wrote in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot. “This explains Sharon’s tremendous urge to humiliate Arafat, a humiliation that has no logical use, but is just an old desire for revenge.”

Arafat Sees Himself as Phoenix or Martyr

Arafat has cast himself as the phoenix who will rise from the ashes--or a hero who will die a martyr’s death.

“The most important thing is not what I am facing,” he told his foreign visitors Sunday, “because for me it is not the first time. You have to remember what happened in Beirut.”

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Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Jerusalem contributed to this report.