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Israel Backs Off Arafat Threat, Mulls Gaza Ouster
Date: Sun, Apr 25, 2004
By Dan Williams
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel backed off its latest threat against Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) Sunday, saying no action was imminent but that the Palestinian president could eventually be expelled to the Gaza Strip (news - web sites).
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites)'s declaration Friday that he was no longer bound by a pledge to the United States not to harm Arafat sparked outcry abroad and speculation in Israel that he was trying to rally right-wing support for a Gaza pullout plan.
A Sharon deputy cast the remarks as a warning to Arafat, who is under virtual Israeli siege in his West Bank compound accused of fomenting violence in a Palestinian revolt. He denies it.
"Prime Minister Ariel Sharon does not intend to put something into action this very week, or today or tomorrow," Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Army Radio Sunday.
"He set out a position in principle regarding Arafat and the immunity he (Arafat) thought he enjoyed."
A senior source in Sharon's office said Israel was examining different plans of action against Arafat. "One option is to expel him to Gaza," the source said without giving details.
Sharon wants to pull Israeli troops and settlers out of Gaza, making way for Palestinian statehood in the coastal strip. But Palestinians reject the Sharon "disengagement plan," calling it a ploy to cement Israel's hold on most of the West Bank.
The Israeli prime minister also faces opposition from within his Likud party, which will hold a May 2 referendum on the plan.
Political analysts saw Sharon's latest threats on Arafat as a bid to win votes from the more hawkish of Likud's 200,000 members, who might be swayed by vigorous pro-settler lobbying.
"He is warming up to their rowdy temperament in order to guarantee their support for his disengagement plan," commentator Uzi Benziman wrote in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz.
SHARON, POWELL DIFFER ON PLEDGE TO BUSH
Washington, lead patron of a tattered "road map" to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, says it still holds Sharon to his promise not to physically harm Arafat.
Israeli Justice Minister Yosef Lapid counseled against risking a diplomatic spat with the country's most important ally. "I do not think we should be quarrelling with the Americans because of Arafat," Lapid told Israel Radio.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie Saturday blamed U.S. "bias" in favor of Israel for emboldening Sharon.
Bush enraged Palestinians and the Arab world earlier this month when he broke with decades of U.S. policy by endorsing Sharon's bid to hold onto large Jewish settlement blocs on West Bank land captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
He also backed Sharon's denial of a right of return for Palestinians dispossessed in the 1948 war of Israel's creation, and millions of their descendants. The Jewish state says a refugee influx would mean demographic suicide.
Arafat, addressing thousands of Palestinians who flocked to his battered Ramallah compound to act as human shields over the weekend, was defiant. "I want to tell Sharon and his gang that the mountain cannot be shaken by the wind," he said Saturday.
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