NABLUS, West Bank, 8 February — Israel launched a second airstrike on a Palestinian Authority compound in the West Bank city of Nablus last night, wounding one person. The attack, which followed one early in the morning, took place while the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was in Washington preparing to press US President George W. Bush to sever ties with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
The missile strike carried out by Israeli helicopter gunships was what the Israeli Army said in further retaliation for the killing of three Israelis on Wednesday night by a Palestinian gunman who infiltrated a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Israeli warplanes hit the same compound in Nablus before dawn yesterday, wounding 11 people.
Two Israeli Cobra helicopters hovered over the Nablus intelligence office firing off one rocket at the building that missed and landed nearby, shattering windows, Palestinian security sources said. They said there were no injuries because the building was empty, and that damage to the office was minimal. Palestinian police cordoned off the area as local residents emerged to view the wreckage.
The second strike after dark destroyed an intelligence service building which had been evacuated before the attack, Palestinian security sources said. Witnesses said at least one person was wounded.
The Israeli Army also yesterday put four West Bank villages under curfew as it combed the nearby area for militants after the attack on the Jewish settlement, Palestinian witnesses told AFP. The security measures were imposed late Wednesday after the attack on the Hamra settlement, in which a gunman from the Hamas resistance group killed a settler woman, her 11-year-old daughter and a solider before being killed himself.
The four villages were Beit Hassan, Ein Shibli, Nassarieh and Aqrabanieh. In the same area some 200 Palestinians were blocked at an Israeli Army checkpoint from late Wednesday through yesterday as they tried to return to their home from a visit to neighboring Jordan.
The European Parliament tried to break Arafat’s isolation yesterday by asking him to address it. It also slammed Sharon for saying he regretted not having killed the Palestinian leader in 1982, when it had him under siege in Beirut. Arafat has been effectively confined to his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah by a ring of Israeli tanks since December.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told the Parliament in Strasbourg yesterday that Arafat remained the legitimate interlocutor for peace talks despite Israel’s dismissal of him as "irrelevant".
