Imad
Saada
NABLUS, West Bank, April 4 (AFP) -
Israel vowed Thursday to block an urgent European peace mission from meeting
Yasser Arafat as its army smashed into the West Bank city of Nablus, fighting
intense battles with armed Palestinians.
World leaders began moving to quell the bloodshed but seemed unable to keep up
with the speed of Israel's military blitz, which in seven days has brought
nearly every major Palestinian town back under its control.
Pessimism over international peace efforts was accompanied by cries for blood revenge on the streets of Arab capitals across the region, where another day of protests and mass rallies lay ahead.
More than 100 Israeli tanks, backed by helicopter gunships, blasted their way late Wednesday into Nablus, the sixth major target in their drive to crush Palestinian resistance on the West Bank.
Heavy shell, machinegun and automatic weapons fire was heard in the city of 100,000 people, the largest in the northern West Bank.
Nablus intelligence chief Talal Diwikat said Apache helicopers were bombarding the western side of the city as Israeli troops pushed into the centre, hindered by heavy fighting.
He said the Israelis were taking over Palestinian houses to use as command posts and were preventing Palestinian ambulances from entering refugee camps that were also invaded.
A Palestinian woman was killed in her home in a large blast that shook the Old City, and a man was shot dead in his house by a sniper, security sources said. At least four Palestinians were reported wounded.
Palestinian forces fired a home-made Qassam rocket toward Israel from Nablus, the army said, adding that it landed harmlessly on Palestinian land.
Amid fears of a "second front" in its campaign, Israel warned it would react "very hard" to new attacks from Lebanon, from where Hezbollah guerrillas and Palestinians have fired on northern Israel and a disputed border area.
"This is now the most dangerous conflict in the world," Britain's Europe Minister Peter Hain said after an emergency EU meeting in Luxembourg on the deepening crisis.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Pique left for Jerusalem on a peace mission, but Israel said they would not be allowed to see Arafat, pinned in his West Bank headquarters by Israeli forces.
"The Europeans' only aim is to provide Arafat with a public platform and that we will not allow," said an Israeli official close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said no Palestinian officials would meet with Solana and Pique if they are blocked from seeing Arafat.
"Whether we meet or not is now irrelevant if they cannot convince Sharon" to end Arafat's isolation, he said.
But another top official said US Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni, who has remained in the region but kept a low US profile, would likely be allowed to meet with Arafat.
The Jewish state says it wants to isolate the Palestinian leader and destroy the "terrorist infrastructure" it claims is integrated into Arafat's self-rule Palestinian Authority.
Israeli troops are fanning across West Bank land handed over to the Palestinians under interim peace accords in the 1990s, conducting house-to-house searches for militants it says are behind anti-Israeli attacks.
The army said Thursday it had arrested 1,100 Palestinians and seized quantities of weapons.
The Palestinian leadership issued a statement late Wednesday calling on the people to brace for "a long resistance against the occupier."
It added: "We say to the Israelis, sincerely, that the behaviour of their government and their army will only separate our two peoples by rivers of blood instead of building bridges of peace between us."
Palestinian gunmen in Bethlehem were still holed up in the Church of the Nativity, one of the holiest sites in Christianity, which is surrounded by Israeli troops, civilians trapped inside told AFP by phone.
They denied Israeli claims that armed Palestinians among them were beginning to surrender and said food supplies inside were running low.
The Israeli siege has left a trail of devastation across the land that the Palestinians had hoped to transfer into an independent Palestinian nation following interim peace accords with the Jewish state.
Roads have been dug up, buildings smashed and vehicles left in flaming ruins. Hospital and aid workers, immobilised by an Israeli-imposed curfew, say they fear unclaimed dead are rotting in the streets.
"People are trapped inside their homes. They lack food, water and medicine. The number of dead and wounded is going up all the time and we can't reach them to help," said Mustafa Barghuti, head of the federation of Palestinian non-governmental organisations.
Arab rage over the Israeli campaign exploded on the streets on Wednesday, when thousands of furious protesters charged the US embassy in Beirut only to be brutally driven back by heavily armed anti-riot police.
Dozens of demonstrators were injured. Other rallies were held in Egypt and Yemen as well as in several European cities, as anger over Israel's clampdown on the Palestinians has spread across the globe.
The United States, Israel's chief backer with some three billion dollars of military and financial aid every year, on Wednesday gave a subtle hint it was listening to the chorus of outrage.
A White House spokesman said President George W. Bush was not opposed to political talks before a ceasefire is agreed, which has been an unwavering demand of Israeli leader Sharon.
Secretary of State Colin Powell shrugged off complaints that Washington was not actively engaged in the peace process.
"We are the ones the world is looking to, to show leadership. We will show leadership," said Powell, who did not rule out meeting leaders from the Middle East next week.
US
diplomats at the United Nations on Wednesday asked for more time to mull an Arab
proposal for a new resolution pressing Israel to heed earlier calls for a
ceasefire and military withdrawal. The UN Security Council was to resume debate
later Thursday.
Sumber :
HarakahDaily
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