Israel Eases Grip on Arafat, but Travel Ban Stays

Israel on Sunday ordered its tanks to pull back from the headquarters of Yasser Arafat but refused to lift a travel ban that has trapped the Palestinian Authority president in the West Bank city of Ramallah for nearly three months.

Palestinian officials reacted angrily to the “humiliating” Israeli decision and suspended recently renewed security contacts with Israel.

The government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed to review its siege of Arafat last week after Palestinian authorities arrested three suspects in the October slaying of a right-wing Israeli Cabinet minister. That decision immediately threatened to fracture Sharon’s coalition government, where there is substantial disagreement over how to treat Arafat.

After a stormy three-hour debate Sunday, the Cabinet emerged with what it said was a compromise for its members but, as far as the Palestinians were concerned, changed little. The Cabinet said Arafat can leave the block-long compound in Ramallah where he has been under virtual house arrest since December and move about the city. Tanks that have watched over Arafat from about 200 feet away will move.

But if he wants to leave Ramallah, the onetime globe-trotting leader will have to seek permission from Sharon.

Israeli officials portrayed the decision--designed, clearly, to hold the fragile government together--as an important first step in easing restrictions.

But Palestinian officials were furious at what they called an empty concession, noting that Arafat had already been leaving the compound, most recently to visit the wounded in Ramallah’s hospital. Continuing to confine him to Ramallah is a blow to tentative efforts aimed at reducing violence, Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said.

“There won’t be any meetings with the Israelis for the time being, whether it’s on the security level or the political level,” Nabil abu Rudaineh, a spokesman for Arafat, told reporters.

Citing last week’s arrests, Israel’s defense and foreign ministers advocated lifting the travel ban on Arafat. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said the siege of Arafat had backfired, allowing him to rally support. And Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said freeing Arafat would encourage him to act more decisively in reining in militants.

But Sharon evidently heeded the threats of hard-line members of his Cabinet who said they would bolt if Arafat was released.

“The important thing,” Sharon’s hawkish public security minister, Uzi Landau, declared, “is those who proposed letting [Arafat] move around the territories and perhaps even go abroad were blocked. . . . Arafat is not leaving Ramallah.”

Palestinians officials, incensed, canceled a security meeting with Israeli officials that had been scheduled for later Sunday--even as small progress was being reported in containing a sudden, bloody surge in attacks and reprisals that claimed dozens of lives last week alone.

“It is a shameful and unacceptable decision,” Erekat, a minister in the Palestinian Cabinet, told reporters. “This reflects the fact that this government has no political program whatsoever and is determined to pursue the path of destruction.”

The last couple of days had seen the two sides taking steps to pull back from what seemed last week like all-out war. Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs met Thursday, for the first time in weeks, and Ben-Eliezer, the defense minister, ordered Israeli forces to use “maximum restraint” during the ongoing Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday and the Jewish holiday of Purim, which starts tonight.

Shootings have continued. A 27-year-old Palestinian woman in labor was being taken to a hospital in the West Bank city of Nablus when Israeli soldiers opened fire on her car early Sunday because it failed to stop at a checkpoint, they said. She was badly injured but delivered a daughter.

In addition, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Ahmed Korei, was shot at by Israeli troops when his car sped up to a checkpoint outside Ramallah on Sunday night. The army said the shooting was a mistake and apologized.

But generally, the number of casualties has dropped off significantly. Arafat reiterated his call for a cease-fire, and Palestinian security agents Thursday arrested three alleged assassins of Rehavam Zeevi, the ultranationalist Israeli tourism minister gunned down in an East Jerusalem hotel Oct. 17 by members of a radical Palestinian faction.

Israel had made the arrests a condition for letting up on Arafat. On Sunday, however, government officials said that at least one other suspect in the case remained at large and that Arafat would also have to extradite the accused killers. Palestinian officials have repeatedly said they will never hand suspects over to Israel.

“They took a small step” with the arrests, Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin said Sunday after the Cabinet meeting, “and we took a small step. They made real arrests, but they haven’t finished the job.”

As part of a campaign to relegate Arafat to political oblivion, Sharon has been gradually tightening the noose around the Palestinian leader.

Retaliating for three suicide bombings that killed 25 Israelis in less than 24 hours, Israeli forces on Dec. 3 destroyed Arafat’s private helicopters, his most common mode of transportation, and the runway at the Palestinians’ only airport. Then, in mid-December, Israel sent tanks deep into Ramallah and over the ensuing weeks ringed Arafat’s headquarters.

He has not been allowed to leave Ramallah since. Israeli authorities rejected his request to attend Christmas services in the Palestinian-ruled town of Bethlehem, an annual appearance that he makes as the Palestinians’ elected president.

Holed up in his headquarters, which has also been the target of Israeli shelling in recent days, Arafat has given interviews and greeted a smattering of diplomats. But it’s a cataclysmic change in his habits: Until he was grounded, Arafat traveled the world at a breakneck pace, attempting to create a sense of international legitimacy.

The stiffest challenge to Sharon from within his Cabinet came from Landau and two ministers affiliated with Zeevi’s political party, who threatened to quit. By appeasing them, Sharon angered politicians from the left who favored a gesture to Arafat.

But Landau said it was important to keep up pressure on the Palestinians. He said the high death toll among Palestinians last week--about 40 were killed, along with 11 Israelis--is what forced Arafat to seek a cease-fire.

“Finally, we started doing something. We initiated. We hit hard,” Landau told Israeli radio. “And consequently the Palestinians came asking for a cease-fire. This means that this is the right policy. If we are successful, why stop? Why not pursue this policy more intensely?”