OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 13 April — US Secretary of State Colin Powell failed to extract a timetable from Ariel Sharon for an Israeli pullback from Palestinian areas when he met the prime minister yesterday. Asked whether Israel had agreed to end its operations in the West Bank by a specific time, Powell said, “I don’t have a specific answer on timing.”
At the joint press conference, Sharon showed no sign of an imminent pullout. “Israel is conducting a war against the Palestinian infrastructure of terrorism and it does hope to conclude this war shortly,” he said.
The Palestinians responded with a bomb attack at a bus stop in Central Jerusalem. A Palestinian woman blew herself up, killing six Israelis and wounding nearly 90. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claimed responsibility.
Jerusalem police chief Mickey Levy said the young woman first headed for an open-air market but changed course upon seeing police guarding the entrance and set off her bomb at the nearby bus stop.
The political fallout was immediate. The White House demanded that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat condemn the attack immediately. Powell’s meeting with Arafat today was posponed to tomorrow, Powell’s spokesman said.
“The president is very troubled by what happened, and the president believes that if Yasser Arafat meant what he committed in the Oslo accords to denounce terrorism, that today would be a particularly apt day for him to publicly express himself in denunciation of this terrorist attack and to show leadership,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
Israel maintained a tight grip on most of the West Bank’s important cities, despite an “I meant what I said” call by Bush this week to heed his demands to begin a pullback immediately.
Emotions ran high over events in the Jenin refugee camp, where Palestinians have accused Israeli forces of committing a massacre. Fierce house-to-house fighting ended there Thursday with the surrender of Palestinian fighters.
Brig. Gen. Ron Kitrey, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, told Army Radio “there were apparently hundreds of dead”, but his office later said he had misspoken and had meant dead and wounded.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Yaakov Levy, said Israel is holding around 4,180 Palestinians prisoner after its incursion into Palestinian Authority areas, with around 60 suspected of crimes.
He said that Israeli courts would deal with the prisoners suspected of crimes, and that the others will be released as quickly as possible.
A Gaza Strip shooting attack left three dead and several wounded as the Israeli Army rounded up “thousands” of men in Jenin.
An Israeli border guard was killed at the Erez crossing from the northern Gaza Strip into Israel in a morning attack in which the assailant and a Palestinian laborer also died, the army said.
The attack was claimed by the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad. It left three other Palestinians wounded, as well as two other border guards and two Israeli civilians, one of them seriously.
In Jenin, the Israeli Army was rounding up “thousands of men, between the age of 15 and 50,” said Mayor Walid Abu Mweiss.
The detainees were being kept in the town’s schools and main square, the mayor said. An Israeli official conceded yesterday that about 250 Palestinian fighters had been killed.
Palestinian leaders, who say the death toll is higher, called for an international inquiry into the weeklong siege of the Jenin camp.
They also appealed to Powell to take a first-hand look.
But Powell instead visited Israel’s border with Lebanon where fighters of the Hezbollah group fired rockets at Israeli military positions.
Israel staged three airstrikes and unleashed a barrage of artillery fire on Hezbollah targets.
The Israeli army admitted it shot and wounded an Armenian monk inside the Church of the Nativity it has besieged for 10 days in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
“This person was not wearing religious clothes and looked armed,” an army spokesman said.
“The Israeli Army fired a shot on this figure,” which appeared to be threatening the monks inside as well as the soldiers outside the church, he added.
The monk, whose identity was not revealed, was taken to the Hadassah hospital in west Jerusalem in serious condition. Some 200 armed Palestinians, together with 30 Franciscan friars and some civilians have been encircled by Israeli troops in the church complex since April 2.
