HEBRON, West Bank, 28 June — Israeli helicopter gunships yesterday fired rockets at Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s local headquarters in Hebron, as the military forces tightened a siege of the building for the second day to force out Palestinian activists. Elsewhere on the West Bank, a Palestinian teenager was shot dead by soldiers, and five people, including children, were wounded. Troops also kept up the pressure on Arafat’s authority by storming a post of his Force 17 personal guard in Nablus, blindfolding 20 members and searching the position for weapons.
And on the Gaza Strip, they attacked a group of Palestinians near the town of Rafah, which straddles the border with Egypt, shooting and wounding six of them. Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rudeina told reporters that Israel’s attacks had US "approval" and accused the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government of shirking calls by US President George W. Bush to withdraw from Palestinian land.
As US-made Apache helicopter gunships smashed rockets into the Hebron building and strafed it with heavy machine-gun fire, Israeli public radio reported that a member of the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah was arrested. The army refused to comment on the report, which said the man was among a group of 20 Palestinians who had surrendered to Israeli troops at an unspecified time.
The radio also reported sporadic exchanges of fire between soldiers and the men entrenched inside the building. Israeli troops laid siege to the building on Wednesday to flush out between 15 and 20 "wanted" persons holed up inside, who the army says are from Tanzim, a group linked to Arafat’s Fatah movement.
According to witnesses, one man emerged from the building Wednesday and gave himself up to soldiers. They identified him as Maamun Amr, an activist of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Fatah.
Reporters said Israeli choppers fired at least five rockets at the building yesterday after soldiers used loudspeakers to order them out, threatening to "destroy everything" if they did not comply.
When a 10-minute deadline passed and no one emerged, the helicopters swooped over it, firing rockets for the first time since Wednesday. In the morning, the aircraft turned their guns on the building.
Hebron Mayor Mustafa Natshe told reporters that "contacts" were under way with Israeli authorities to find a solution to the standoff but admitted "they have produced no results". The Palestinians, he said, have asked the Israelis to allow Red Cross officials inside the building. "The Israelis turned down the request," he said.
Palestinian sources said a former Palestinian Cabinet minister, Talal Sadr, was leading the negotiations on a personal level, without any mandate from the Palestinian Authority. According to Sadr, the negotiations, which began shortly after midnight, had been suspended around 6:30 p.m. (1530 GMT).
In the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya, near Nablus, Israeli troops shot and wounded three children, including Fayek Daood, nine, who was seriously hit in the head, Palestinian security and medical sources said.
The shooting occurred when people took to the streets of Qalqilya after the army lifted a curfew for a few hours. Soldiers opened fire, for no apparent reason, forcing people to dash for cover, witnesses said.
Last week, the Israeli Army launched a new offensive against the West Bank, code named Determined Path, seizing seven of its eight key towns and imposing curfews. Before dawn yesterday, 17-year-old Muhammad Ayesh was shot dead by soldiers in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus, after he fired at a tank with a pistol. In Bethlehem, soldiers arrested Nidal Abu Aker, 33, of the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, according to sources with the PFLP, which claimed an Israeli cabinet minister’s assassination last October.
Palestinian officials brushed aside yesterday a threat by US President George W. Bush to withhold financial aid and said Palestinians would defy US pressure to replace their longtime leader, Arafat.
"The call by Bush contradicts the principles of democracy claimed by the United States," Palestinian Telecommunications Minister Imad Al-Falouji told Reuters.
"No one has the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the Palestinian people." Arafat aide Ahmed Abdel-Rahman accused Bush of conducting an "unfair campaign" against the Palestinian leadership.
In Khartoum, the Organization of the Islamic Conference decided yesterday to reactivate an economic boycott of Israel, at the end of a three-day meeting of foreign ministers in the Sudanese capital. The measure, laid down in the meeting’s final statement, was taken in support of the Palestinians and in protest against Israel’s harsh policy.
The OIC called on its 57 members to "respect the Islamic boycott against Israel and to consider its (the organization’s) legislation and rules governing the boycott as part of their national legislation."
The statement also called on each member state to set up a special office to oversee the boycott and to coordinate with the Syria-based pan-Arab Office of the Boycott of Israel (OBI). Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail told a press conference that the OIC had "a (boycott) committee, but it was frozen and the decision has been taken to reactivate it."
The OIC ministers voiced support to Arafat as leader of the Palestinian people. The ministers made no mention of Bush’s speech this week on Middle East peace in their final statement issued at the end of their three-day meeting in the Sudanese capital.
But the statement "renewed the Islamic nation’s collective support to the Palestinian people’s struggle to recover their rights (...) under the leadership of President Yasser Arafat." The OIC backed the "Palestinian people’s struggle to make Israel withdraw to the June 4, 1967 borders, to build an independent state with (east) Jerusalem as capital and to obtain the refugees’ (right to) return," it added.
