Israel Corners a Defiant Arafat

Tossing stun grenades as they moved from room to room, Israeli commandos blasted their way deep into Yasser Arafat’s compound here Friday until they had the Palestinian Authority president cornered. As he sought cover from heavy fire, Arafat vowed that he would not be taken alive.

“They want me to be a hostage or a prisoner or a dead person,” the defiant Palestinian Authority president told an Arabic-language television station. “I want to be a martyr, a martyr, a martyr.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he holds Arafat, his longtime archenemy, responsible for a wave of suicide bombings that has killed dozens of Israelis, including an attack on the opening night of Passover that Israelis have called a watershed event. Arafat heads a “coalition of terror,” Sharon said Friday, that must be eliminated.

Sharon said the offensive would last “weeks” and “know no borders.”

In a drama that unfolded throughout the day, Israeli tanks and infantry seized almost all of Arafat’s headquarters, cutting electricity and phone lines, as part of what Sharon said would be a decisive, far-reaching campaign to “isolate” Arafat.

By nightfall, Arafat was confined to a couple of rooms, his aides said, after troops moved in on him from the east and west. The Israeli army said it had seized 95 people and a cache of weapons, including 25 fighters captured early today after an all-night gun battle. One of them, the army said, was a senior member of Arafat’s Fatah movement.

Five Palestinians and two Israeli officers were killed in gun battles around the compound and fighting elsewhere. Some of the dead and about 25 wounded were Arafat’s bodyguards who tried to fight off the Israelis. The casualties also included civilians.

Israeli officials insisted that they don’t intend to kill or capture Arafat, and relayed those assurances to U.S. officials. But on the ground, Palestinians were convinced that the opposite was true.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, while calling for Israeli restraint in the attack on Arafat’s headquarters, laid the blame on the shoulders of Palestinian attackers.

“Let’s be clear about what brought it all to a halt: terrorism,” he said in Washington. “Terrorism . . . has dealt a serious blow to the effort to achieve a cease-fire.” But he said the United States will press ahead with its latest diplomatic effort to work out a truce.

It was not completely clear what Sharon planned to do with Arafat. At the least, Sharon probably intends to humiliate the Palestinian leader in the eyes of his people. Or he may be planning to expel Arafat, as many in the Israeli government favor doing.

Sharon and Arafat have battled each other for decades. In 1982, Sharon led Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in pursuit of Arafat, who then commanded the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut. Sharon laid siege then to Arafat’s positions, eventually forcing him to escape to Tunisia--where he regrouped and lived to fight another day.

The destruction of the Ramallah compound, a blocklong collection of white stone and brick buildings, is Israel’s most direct assault yet on Arafat.

“I think they’re trying to scare the Palestinian people to make us raise the white flag of surrender,” said Nidal Nafez, 32, one of the few people who ventured out of their homes in Ramallah on Friday. “They’re saying, ‘This is your leader and we can kill him.’ . . . But it won’t work, because all of us have arrived at the point of no return.”

The reaction throughout the Arab world was equally harsh. Just one day after Arab leaders endorsed a historic peace initiative at a summit in Beirut, protesters took to the streets in Lebanon to denounce the Israeli incursion. Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, the host of the summit, said the Israeli action was a slap in the face to the Arab leaders who attended.

“Hours after the Arab peace initiative was issued from the Beirut summit, Israel replied with a barbaric war and a flagrant and brutal aggression,” Lahoud said.

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who had offered up the peace initiative, told reporters in Beirut that the raid was a “savage, despicable act, an inhuman and cruel act.”

If Israel had hoped to stamp out terror with the military actions, it did not succeed Friday. The latest suicide bomber was an 18-year-old Palestinian woman from a refugee camp near Bethlehem.

The woman, Hayat Akhras, walked to the entrance of a suburban supermarket in Jerusalem, where Israelis were shopping just before the advent of the Jewish Sabbath. A guard became suspicious and prevented her from going inside. She blew herself up near the doorway, killing herself and two other people. About 30 people suffered mostly minor injuries.

One of the dead was apparently the guard who prevented wider tragedy. He was a neighborhood fixture, heightening the fury over the attack.

“I ran over to where the bomb went off, but there was no one to save,” said Shay, a neighborhood kiosk vendor who gave only one name. “They come to our stores and kill us. It’s one-sided. We have to kill them now. If Arafat can’t control them, the army will have to take the territories back.”

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Arafat’s Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for Friday’s bombing. Akhras was the third female suicide bomber in the 18-month intifada against Israeli rule.

Israeli officials revealed Friday that the combat reserve call-up announced the day before will involve at least 20,000 men and women, an indication that the military operation begun Thursday night in Ramallah will expand throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip and will be wide-ranging and open-ended.

It is the largest call-up in a decade, Israeli officials said.

Busloads of men and women were already reporting for duty Friday at sign-up centers across the country and bidding farewell to their spouses and parents. The mass mobilization reminded many here of scenes from the eve of the 1967 Middle East War.

The scene in Ramallah was one of full-scale onslaught.

Israeli forces used armored vehicles and bulldozers to punch holes first in the perimeter walls of Arafat’s compound and then in the sides of buildings. Troops were searching office to office, room to room in the two buildings that flank Arafat’s offices on the eastern and western sides. By late afternoon, they had moved to within spitting distance of where Arafat sits.

Arafat spent most of the day giving telephone interviews to Arabic-language television stations and other news outlets and talking to world leaders. Pictures showed him in a windowless room flanked by two aides, a gun on the table in front of him.

Although the focus was on Arafat’s headquarters, Israeli forces had seized control of most of the city. Israeli snipers took up positions on rooftops in downtown Ramallah. Tanks rumbled through streets in almost every neighborhood of the city that just two years ago was widely seen as the prosperous, de facto capital of a Palestinian state.

At downtown’s Manara Square, armed Palestinians staked out corners and lay in wait to ambush tanks that were as close as a block away.

Soldiers also took over offices used by Palestinian and foreign media, forcing several news organizations to abandon the premises.

A Palestinian cameraman for an Egyptian television network was shot in the face when Israeli troops opened fire on his van, which was marked with signs saying “TV,” witnesses said. In video footage by a passenger in the van, the source of the fire was not clear.

One of the dead Friday was an older, gray-haired man found in a fetal position on a sidewalk near Arafat’s compound. He had been shot twice and apparently bled to death.

Another was a fighter in camouflage fatigues, his head wrapped in a checked kaffiyeh. He had fired wildly toward Israeli soldiers, then was felled by a single bullet to the neck.

MORE INSIDE

U.S. reaction: Powell says he understands Israeli actions but sees Arafat as a legitimate leader. A10

United Nations: Fears of an all-out war dominate an emergency Security Council meeting. A12

Arab protests: Leaders and civilians across the Middle East condemn Israel’s offensive. A12