Israel Attacks Arafat Compound

Israeli forces today smashed their way into the Ramallah headquarters of Yasser Arafat and fought fierce gun battles with his bodyguards. Israel formally declared the Palestinian leader an enemy and said he would be “completely isolated.”

Arafat desperately appealed to world leaders to save him as Israel launched its most punishing large-scale offensive yet against the Palestinians in the wake of a Passover suicide bombing that killed 21 Jews.

About 40 tanks and armored personnel carriers roared into the West Bank city of Ramallah before dawn and surrounded Arafat’s compound. They punched gaping holes in the front gates as his guards manned the walls and roofs and exchanged fire with tanks shooting heavy machine guns. Several Palestinians and Israeli soldiers were reported wounded.

The tanks then fired rockets into the blocklong compound, witnesses said, setting several buildings ablaze. Tanks approached within yards of Arafat’s private office, which was filling with smoke, said Mohammed Dahlan, a Palestinian security chief.

“The situation is very grave,” Arafat advisor Nabil abu Rudaineh said from inside the besieged buildings, where the Palestinian Authority president and his inner circle were holed up. “We’ve been trying to reach world leaders, but it’s early and they’re still asleep.”

Firefights erupted elsewhere in the city as troops and tanks took up positions and rounded up Palestinian men. One woman was reported killed in her car.

Branding Arafat’s eleventh-hour offer of a cease-fire a ploy, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon presided over an extraordinary all-night meeting of his government to plan the offensive. Many members wanted to expel Arafat, but the majority decided to cut him off from the outside world but allow him to remain in Ramallah. Expulsion remained a future option, however.

The army was ordered to “strike everywhere” and to destroy as much “terrorist infrastructure” as possible. “Restraint is dead,” one official said. “We will fight terror until it is vanquished.”

Israel also called up combat unit reserves to expand its manpower, another reflection of the deepening war footing that Israel and the Palestinians are now on.

In addition to the killing of 21 people at a Passover Seder on Wednesday, a Palestinian gunman on Thursday burst into a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and killed four Israelis from the same family, and early today a Palestinian infiltrated a settlement in the Gaza Strip and stabbed two Israelis to death.

Medical examiners worked to identify mangled bodies from Wednesday’s suicide bombing in the coastal city of Netanya. The attack was one of the deadliest in 18 months of relentless bloodshed, and its psychological impact for Israelis was all the more devastating because it came on a date of utmost religious significance for Jews, the opening night of Passover. Israelis called it a watershed event, a point of no return.

Israeli officials earlier said the army had been instructed to abide by a commitment not to physically harm Arafat. However, Sharon said this week that he was sorry he ever made that promise to President Bush.

Earlier on Thursday, in a clear bid to temper the fury of the expected Israeli onslaught, Arafat summoned reporters to his headquarters and said he was ready to work toward a truce. But he didn’t declare a cease-fire outright, and his statements fell short of the unilateral cease-fire he declared Dec. 16 under intense U.S. pressure.

“I assert our readiness to implement an immediate cease-fire, and we have informed Gen. Zinni,” Arafat told the news conference, referring to U.S. special envoy Anthony C. Zinni, whose truce-seeking mission here has all but collapsed.

Opening the sober, angry Cabinet meeting, where the Passover killings dominated the agenda, Sharon said Arafat and only Arafat was to blame. The prime minister said Israel now faces “a new and different situation.”

This morning, Sharon emerged from the seven-hour meeting and said his government was launching an “extended operation against Palestinian terrorism.” It was “not a reoccupation” of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he said, “but a long, complicated war” that “knows no borders.”

“Arafat, who has formed a coalition of terror against Israel, is an enemy and at this stage shall be isolated,” Sharon said at a hastily arranged news conference in Jerusalem.

He refused to say what would be done to Arafat.

Palestinians accused Israel of ignoring efforts by Arab states and U.S. mediators to ease tensions. The Bush administration had earlier pressed Sharon to show restraint but also called on Arafat to make an Arabic-language appeal to his people for calm. Neither Middle Eastern leader appeared to be paying heed.

In Elon Moreh, a Jewish settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus, a Palestinian gunman burst into a house where a settler family was celebrating Passover with guests. He killed or mortally wounded four members of the family and then barricaded himself on an upper story when armed settlers and troops rushed to the scene.

Two sons in the family managed to hide, and for a time it was thought that the gunman had taken hostages. But the two were able to leap from a window and escape.

In a gun battle, soldiers shot dead the Palestinian. The radical Islamic organization Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, as it had for Wednesday’s bombing. Settlements throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip were placed on high alert.

Elon Moreh is one of the more radical settlements among the more than 170 that fragment the West Bank and Gaza Strip and are considered illegal under international law. Yet in the current climate of hardened hatreds, the radicals have become more mainstream.

“There may be only one terrorist in Elon Moreh tonight, but there are tens of thousands of terrorists throughout the land of Israel,” the settlement’s rabbi, Elyakim Levanon, said. “They must all be cleaned out. Otherwise, there will be no peace, not only in Elon Moreh but in all of the land of Israel.”

About the same time that Elon Moreh was under attack, Arafat was cautioning that a massive Israeli military operation now would endanger a new peace proposal endorsed at an Arab League summit just concluded in Beirut.

Palestinian officials said their security forces had begun rounding up a number of militants from Hamas and its sister organization Islamic Jihad. The arrests could not be confirmed independently; past roundups have been only token in nature.

Israel scoffed at Arafat’s gestures.

“What we need are actions, not empty statements after which more Israelis die,” Sharon advisor Dore Gold said.

Israeli officials had little use for the Arab League proposal, saying it is difficult to speak of peace when terrorism is rampant.

Terrified Palestinian civilians, meanwhile, braced for what they expected to be a harsh Israeli military onslaught. This time, they fear, Israeli forces will invade and stay.

In Ramallah, Palestinians emptied store shelves in panic buying. They stocked up on food, water and other supplies in expectation of indefinite confinement to their homes. By the afternoon, Ramallah looked a ghost town. People went home early from work or collected their children from school, everyone trying to stay out of harm’s way.

Suad Attalah, a mother of three from Ramallah’s Al Birah neighborhood, filled her grocery cart with milk, bread and cans of food.

“We expect another invasion, and this time it may take longer,” she said. In the first two weeks of this month, scores of Palestinians were killed and hundreds arrested in a huge military operation.

Some Ramallah residents also hoped to flee, at least temporarily. Huge crowds massed at the main military checkpoint that Israel has set up to control Palestinian comings and goings. But no one seemed to be able to leave.

Israeli tanks could be seen massing around Ramallah and Nablus. In Gaza, tanks sliced the narrow strip that is home to 1.2 million Palestinians into three segments, blocking transit from north to south.

Israel’s next offensive may be more far-reaching than the incursions into Palestinian towns and refugee camps earlier this month. That sweep was Israel’s biggest military operation in the West Bank and Gaza since capturing those territories in the 1967 Middle East War, and it triggered a barrage of international condemnation.

Speaking on Israel TV, military affairs analyst Ron Ben-Ishai said senior army officers and Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had come up with a plan to send troops into Palestinian territories to capture suspected militants and deter attacks. The operation, which needs Cabinet approval, would exceed the scope of previous ones but would stop short of a full reoccupation, he said.

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