JERUSALEM, 3 March 2004 — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon yesterday threatened Yasser Arafat with assassination, calling the Palestinian president a poor insurance risk.
The United States said it opposed the assassination of the veteran Palestinian leader.
The Israeli Army killed three Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while in Jerusalem’s Old City, police stormed the square outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque after Friday prayers.
Israeli police said officers used rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse Palestinians and arrested 14 after prayers. Dozens of people were wounded, including three journalists.
Sharon made his most explicit threat yet against Arafat in newspaper interviews 10 days after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in a helicopter strike in Gaza.
“I wouldn’t suggest either one of them should feel secure. I wouldn’t propose that any insurance company give them coverage,” Sharon told Israel’s Haaretz daily.
In the West Bank town of Qalqilya, about 5,000 Palestinian Hamas leaders and supporters vowed to avenge Yassin’s killing and hanged effigies of Sharon and US President George W. Bush.
“Hamas will continue its path of resistance,” Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’ political chief living in exile in Syria, told the crowd by telephone hookup from Damascus.
Arafat, holed up in his battered headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, denies involvement in violence.
Responding to Sharon’s threats, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told reporters in Washington: “Our position on such questions — the exile or assassination of Yasser Arafat — is very well known. We are opposed and we have made that very clear to the government of Israel.”
Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said of Sharon’s remarks that the alternative to Arafat would be “chaos, extremism and anarchy” in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel’s government declared in September that Arafat should be “removed”. But Arafat, 74, regarded by Palestinians as a symbol of their struggle for statehood, has scoffed at such threats saying he would welcome “martyrdom”.
Sharon, moreover, has acknowledged he has promised the United States not to harm Arafat.
The Israeli premier also directed his warning at Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, saying: “Anyone who kills a Jew or harms an Israeli citizen, or sends someone to kill Jews, is a marked man. Period.”
Sharon is under pressure from far right coalition partners — the same political allies who have long demanded that Israel kill Arafat — over his plan to remove soldiers and settlers from most of Gaza and some of the West Bank.
Sharon is due to hold talks with the US president in Washington on April 14 to finalize details of the plan.
A diplomatic source said US envoys made progress toward hammering out letters of understanding that would be exchanged during the meeting with Bush.
Sharon wants US endorsement of Israel’s annexation of large West Bank settlement blocs and a rejection of a Palestinian claim of a right of return of refugees displaced when Israel was founded in 1948.
The source said US officials were looking for vague wording that would meet Sharon’s need to mollify right-wingers opposed to the pullout plan but which would not prejudge negotiations for a final peace agreement.
The Maariv daily quoted Sharon as saying all settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank would be evacuated. He said he hoped the Gaza pullout, in what he called the absence of a Palestinian peace partner, would be under way by next spring.
But his proposal could be rendered moot should he lose a binding referendum he plans to hold on the issue in his Likud party or if Israel’s attorney general accepts prosecutors’ recommendations to indict him in a bribery case.
Israeli troops killed a Palestinian near the West Bank town of Bethlehem during a clash with stone-throwers. Military sources said he threw a petrol bomb at troops, who fired back.
In the southern Gaza Strip, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian during a raid to uncover weapons-smuggling tunnels in Rafah refugee camp near the Egyptian border, witnesses said.
In a separate incident in the central Gaza Strip, soldiers shot dead a Palestinian, who they said was a gunman, but who Palestinian security sources said was a farmer.
— Additional input from agencies
