Saturday, April 24, 2004
Threats against Arafat are popular with hard-liners in Israel's conservative party.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
JERUSALEM -- Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat scoffed Saturday at the latest threats on his life by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, saying he and other Palestinians consider themselves "martyrs in waiting."
As usual, warnings by Israel that it might move against Arafat brought an emphatic show of popular support for the Palestinian leader.
Several thousand Palestinians rallied at his half-ruined headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah, shouting slogans of support for the Palestinian Authority president.
"We will sacrifice our blood, our souls, for you!" the crowd chanted.
Arafat -- pale from his long confinement inside his compound, tottering slightly as he raised his hands to make V-for-victory signs -- invoked a much-used Arab proverb to express determination not to be intimidated.
"The wind cannot move the mountain," he said to shouts and cheers.
Sharon explicitly has threatened Arafat many times before, but in his latest warning, delivered Friday night in an Israeli television interview, he spoke of having told President Bush earlier this month that he did not feel bound by an earlier pledge to refrain from physically harming the Palestinian leader.
Bush's opposition
The Bush administration swiftly noted that it believed assassinating Arafat would be a bad idea.
The Israeli leader is facing a vote next Sunday in his conservative Likud party on his plan that calls for a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip but the retention of large Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank.
Hard-liners in Sharon's party, however, oppose giving up the Gaza settlements, and the referendum contest is thought to be a close one.
Israel, meanwhile, pressed ahead Saturday with raids in the West Bank it said are aimed at killing or capturing Palestinian militants bent on carrying out attacks against Israelis. But as happens often in the course of these operations, a Palestinian bystander appears to have been caught in the crossfire.
16-year-old killed
One of three Palestinians killed Saturday in the West Bank town of Jenin was a 16-year-old boy on his way home from school, Palestinian witnesses said. The Israeli army contested that account, saying all three of those slain were fugitive militants.
Sharon's threats against Arafat also had the effect of forging unity, at least temporarily, between Arafat and his beleaguered prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, who has been telling associates he wants to quit.
The Palestinian prime minister, who has been in office for six months but has had no significant policy achievements, issued a statement saying Sharon felt able to threaten Arafat only because of the "flagrant" show of U.S. favoritism toward Israel during Sharon's April 14 visit to Washington, D.C.