Israel Vows to Seize Arafat’s Territories

Israel said it will seize Palestinian-controlled territory and stay there until terrorism stops, in a policy about-face announced early this morning after a deadly suicide bombing in Jerusalem.

The Tuesday blast tore apart a bus, killing the attacker and 19 other people on board, and wounding more than 50.

Israel’s decision came as the region awaits the expected unveiling of President Bush’s vision for resolving the Middle East conflict. Israel’s move is likely to greatly complicate Bush’s efforts to stop the bloodshed and bring Israelis and Palestinians back to negotiations.

Through nearly two years of fighting, Israel has clung to the principle that it did not want to indefinitely reoccupy Palestinian population centers handed over under the 1993 Oslo peace accords. But government sources confirmed early today that the Cabinet has now abandoned that principle.

In a statement, the government said Israel will respond to Tuesday’s bombing by “capturing Palestinian Authority territory” and that “these areas will be held by Israel as long as terror continues.”

Israeli troops and tanks moved into the northern West Bank city of Jenin before the statement was issued, and later also entered Nablus. The army cut Jenin off from the refugee camp on its outskirts and moved inside the camp, according to Palestinian witnesses. An army spokesman said that “there’s an operation in Jenin against the terrorist infrastructure in the city.” There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Early today, an army spokesman said that troops were deployed inside Jenin and that the city was under a curfew. He said troops had withdrawn from Nablus. But a government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the army would seize “a Palestinian area within hours, and it’s for keeps now. We’re not going to leave.” He refused to say which area would be targeted.

In Washington, the White House had no immediate comment on the Israeli announcement. It was unclear what effect it might have on the administration’s peace proposal. But earlier Tuesday, White House officials condemned the attack in Jerusalem and insisted that it would not affect either the timing or the content of Bush’s announcement of his plan.

“The president condemns this act of terror in the strongest possible terms,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. “These terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children are enemies of peace.”

The Israeli decision to step up its military actions came after a day of consultations between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his security chiefs and senior Cabinet ministers.

Sharon started the morning Tuesday with a rare appearance at the site of a terrorist attack, rushing to the scene shortly after a 22-year-old student from An Najah University in the West Bank detonated a bomb packed with ball bearings and nails in the No. 32 bus.

Surveying the carnage of Jerusalem’s deadliest such attack in six years, Sharon heaped scorn on Bush’s anticipated call for the establishment of a provisional Palestinian state in areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip now controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

“The horrible pictures we saw here today of these murderous acts by the Palestinians are stronger than any words,” said a grim-faced Sharon, standing near a row of corpses covered with black plastic sheeting. “It is interesting [to speculate about] what kind of Palestinian state they intend to create. What are they talking about? This terrible thing ... is a continuation of the Palestinian terror which we will fight against.”

The radical Islamic group Hamas claimed responsibility for the bombing in a statement and promised more attacks to come.

“We tell all Zionists to prepare their coffins and graves because their dead will be in the hundreds,” the statement said.

The Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, condemned the bombing, but Israel nonetheless blamed its president, Yasser Arafat.

Government officials immediately said there would be a series of military responses. Tanks and troops have been deployed on the outskirts of Palestinian towns for weeks and routinely enter them to hunt down militants.

Late Tuesday, Palestinians reported that dozens of Israeli tanks and an armored bulldozer were rumbling into Jenin. Palestinians said that the tanks shot toward Jenin’s refugee camp and that militants fired back. A pair of Israeli helicopters hovered over Jenin, a stronghold of Islamic militancy.

In a separate action, just hours after the bus was bombed, Israeli troops shot dead Muhmad Basharat, a militant with Islamic Jihad, at a roadblock near the West Bank city of Hebron. The army said he was shot when he reached for a gun during an identity check.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Arafat has his headquarters, shopkeepers closed their stores early and residents hoarded food in anticipation of an Israeli incursion.

Yasser Abed-Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of culture and information, predicted gloomily that the bus attack would “serve Israel as a pretext to step up its aggression” on the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan Khatib blamed the attacks on “the absence of a political initiative and the procrastination of the United States and the international community.”

Among the Israelis killed in Tuesday’s attack were teenagers and children on their way to school, who died along with the Palestinian bomber from Faraa refugee camp, near Nablus. Dozens of office workers, retirees and others were wounded in the blast, which reduced the red and white bus to a charred skeleton.

Police said that at least 14 of the dead lived in Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, built on land Israel annexed after the 1967 Middle East War. Since the current fighting between Israelis and Palestinians erupted in September 2000, Gilo has been fired on frequently by Palestinian gunmen in neighboring Beit Jala and Bethlehem, in the West Bank.

The bus was traveling from Gilo to Jerusalem’s central bus station and had just made a stop in the Palestinian village of Beit Safafa, in Jerusalem, when it exploded near the Patt junction.

Cutting short an official visit to Bulgaria and Slovenia, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres rushed back to join the government debate on a response. Before his departure, Peres told reporters that the focus should be on a political horizon rather than a military front. But others in the Cabinet called for Arafat’s expulsion from the Palestinian territories and for Israel to topple the Palestinian Authority.

“We have to make sure that Yasser Arafat will not be able any longer to control and to be the head of the Palestinians,” said Minister of Education Limor Livnat. “We will need to make sure that Arafat personally will not be any longer in this area, because he is the sponsor of terror attacks.”

Effi Eitam, a minister without portfolio and head of the National Religious Party who has been criticized by Labor ministers as a right-wing extremist, said: “There’s not much disagreement at a time when all of Israel has become a front for unprecedented terror. There is no place for illusion, no virtual solutions. It is time to act.

“There are moments in the life of a people,” Eitam added, “when things are very simple. We must fight for our home. It is either us or them.”

Israel launched a massive military sweep across the West Bank in March, after a suicide bomber blew himself up and killed 29 Israelis in the Park Hotel in the coastal city of Netanya, where families had gathered to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Passover.

The incursion, called Operation Defensive Shield, was declared a success when it ended in May. At the time, the army said it had broken the back of the “terrorist infrastructure” in the West Bank. But the pace of attacks inside Israel has quickened in recent weeks.

On Sunday, Israel began building a security fence between it and the West Bank that is intended to help shield communities inside the pre-1967 border from suicide attacks. The fence is expected to take up to a year to complete.

Sharon advisor Zalman Shoval said Tuesday that the attacks that have already occurred have virtually destroyed the Israeli public’s desire to resume negotiations with the Palestinians.

“More and more, Israelis are saying to themselves: If this is what the Palestinians do, and if this is what the present Palestinian leadership supports or at least does nothing to stop, then the whole idea of living in peace alongside such a Palestinian entity sounds more like living in the realm of fantasy and not reality,” said Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington.

For parents who had sent their children to school Tuesday, the morning was one of horror.

After the blast, frantic parents rushed to the scene, raced to hospitals and, in the saddest cases, headed for Abu Kabir, the national forensic laboratory. Doctors there said that bodies were so badly mangled, it was difficult to identify them. Dozens of people were hospitalized, some with serious injuries. Such attacks “always come at a crucial time ... for people that are genuinely interested in resuming a political process,” said Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert.

Olmert said Israel has “enormous respect” for Bush and his fight against terrorism. “But I’m afraid his speech will not be practical and will not bear any immediate consequences because as along as Yasser Arafat is here, there will be no change. Arafat is terror. Arafat is blood.”

Ehud Yaari, an analyst for Israel Television’s Second Channel, said Tuesday night that the security services intended to begin expelling Palestinian leaders, possibly including Marwan Barghouti, the West Bank leader of the Tanzim militia, who was arrested in April by Israeli troops in Ramallah.

Times staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.