OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 16 December 2002 — Israel yesterday barred Palestinian President Yasser Arafat from visiting Bethlehem for Christmas and decided to keep its army in the West Bank city over the holiday.

Announcing the Israeli Cabinet decision, a government source said soldiers in Bethlehem would keep “normal security procedures in place” while allowing foreign visitors, Palestinian Christians in the West Bank and Israeli Christians into the town for Christmas celebrations.

“The Israeli decision aims to provoke the Palestinian people and the Arab nation and belittle international efforts exerted to salvage the peace process,” Arafat’s aide, Nabil Abu Rudainah, said.

Earlier, the Palestinian leader told Osama Bin Laden to stop claiming he was fighting for the Palestinians and dismissed Israeli charges that Al-Qaeda is active in the Palestinian territories. “Why is Bin Laden talking about Palestine now?” the Palestinian president was quoted as saying in an interview with Britain’s Sunday Times. “He never helped us. He was working in another, completely different area and against our interests.”

The Palestinian leader also demanded that Bin Laden stop exploiting the Palestinian cause to further his own interests. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for two attacks on Israeli tourists in Kenya last month, calling them revenge for Israel’s military countermeasures against the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, Israeli authorities said three Palestinians living in annexed East Jerusalem had been arrested on charges of plotting attacks, including one to shoot down Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s helicopter. The three were planning a missile attack on Sharon’s helicopter at the helipad outside his Jerusalem office, legal sources said. The three men were named as Omar Atrash, 22, Hadr Abu Hadr, 22, and Zyad Atrash, 25, all from the East Jerusalem district of Tzur Bacher, and all equipped with Israeli identity cards, as is the case with East Jerusalem Palestinian residents.

On the political front, the secretary-general of Israel’s opposition Labour party said it was ready to renounce the Jewish state’s annexation of Arab areas of East Jerusalem in return for a peace deal with the Palestinians.

“We want Jerusalem to become a city where one can live a normal life and the annexed Arab neighborhoods are not part of the city. This measure was taken to enlarge Jerusalem,” Ofer Pines told public radio. “To manage to have the Jewish part recognized as the eternal capital of Israel by the whole world, in return for a renunciation of the Arab areas and as a way to peace, that would be the best news possible for the people of Israel,” he said.

Israel seized East Jerusalem in the 1967 war with its Arab neighbors and has since then built dozens of Jewish neighborhoods in the area.