http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41145-2001Dec13.html

Israeli Troops Attack Arafat Sites
Strikes Appear Designed to Strip Away Palestinian Leader's Symbols of Power

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 14, 2001; Page A42

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Dec. 13 -- A pair of Israeli tanks stood at noon on a bluff overlooking Yasser Arafat's headquarters in the center of this West Bank city. The barrels of their canons swiveled this way and that, coming to rest trained at the Palestinian leader's compound 150 yards away.

The tanks, which held their fire, had moved into town before dawn, a few hours after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government, furious over the latest Palestinian terrorist attack, pronounced Arafat "irrelevant." But the message of their pointed gun barrels was clear: Arafat was not so irrelevant that Israel was ignoring him and his Palestinian Authority.

Israeli troops blew up the main radio transmission tower of Arafat's Palestinian Broadcasting Corp., sending the 100-foot structure into a slow-motion dive that elicited gasps from Ramallah residents. An army bulldozer smashed a nearby broadcasting compound, leaving a pair of pale yellow buildings in twin heaps.

Other soldiers occupied the three-room apartment belonging to Arafat's chief lieutenant here, Marwan Barghouti, unnerving Barghouti's wife and four children. Barghouti himself, wanted by Israel on suspicion of organizing attacks, has not been home for weeks.

This evening, Israeli warplanes and helicopters launched attacks on the Palestinian Authority's security and police outposts. They also hit offices of Arafat's Fatah organization in Gaza City, Ramallah and, in the northern West Bank, the city of Jenin. In Gaza, 25 people were reported injured.

[Early Friday, Israeli tanks moved into two villages in the West Bank: Dura and Salfit, where four Palestinian policemen were killed, the Associated Press reported.]

Taken together, the Israeli actions seemed designed to strip Arafat of his remaining symbols of power and drive home Sharon's point that the Palestinian leader's time has passed.

As Israel kept up its attacks, U.S. officials said they were reevaluating the mission of the special envoy to the Middle East, Anthony C. Zinni, whose efforts to mediate a cease-fire have been fruitless. The retired Marine Corps general, who arrived in Israel on Nov. 26, has been unable to prod Arafat to initiate a broad crackdown against Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. Zinni has said reining in the two radical Palestinian groups is the first step toward defusing the 14 1/2-month-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank that has killed about 1,000 people.

Hamas took responsibility for the ambush of a bus in the West Bank that killed 10 Israelis on Wednesday evening. The Palestinian Authority reacted by announcing it would close all offices and institutions affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But there was little sign today of a concerted move by Arafat's forces against the Islamic groups, which run a variety of social, health and charitable organizations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli officials insisted they would not strike at Arafat personally. But having deemed Arafat "irrelevant," Israeli military forces seemed to have set out to make him so.

"The message is as it was in past days," said Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, an Israeli army spokesman. "We see the leader of this Palestinian Authority as fully responsible for this escalation of violence, and for the fact that terrorists have not been arrested and terrorism is increasing. But we have no intention at all of hitting Arafat. We don't even look at him as relevant."

The radio tower in Ramallah was built by the British in 1934, 14 years before Israel's founding. Israeli army demolition experts brought it down with two resounding booms. The downing forced Voice of Palestine radio to shift from AM to FM transmission, sharply reducing its potential audience outside the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli officials said the tower was felled because Voice of Palestine radio had incited violence, glorified attacks on Israelis and peddled anti-Semitism. "This radio station is broadcasting incitement and propaganda that we can compare to [Joseph] Goebbels' Nazi propaganda during the Second World War," Rafowicz said. "Something had to stop this mountain of lies and terroristic material broadcast against the Jewish people."

Radwan Abu Ayyash, chairman of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corp., watched the radio transmission tower come down as an Israeli tank stood sentry not 10 paces away. "It's another crime against human rights, against the [broadcasting] profession and against the Palestinian people," he said.

Israeli officials said troops seized Barghouti's apartment in Ramallah because it offered a vantage point that was "topographically advantageous." That Barghouti is a wanted man had nothing to do with the raid, they said.

Reached by telephone today, Barghouti sounded unconvinced. "This is part of Israel's comprehensive war," he said. "They want to destroy everything."

Since the Palestinians used a roadside bomb, grenades and machine guns to carry out the bus ambush Wednesday near the Jewish settlement of Immanuel, Israeli warplanes and helicopters have carried out more than a dozen strikes in the West Bank and Gaza. Coupled with intense diplomatic pressure from the Bush administration, European officials and the U.N. special envoy in the region, Terje Roed-Larsen, the Israeli attacks have backed Arafat into a corner.

If he launches a full-scale crackdown on Hamas, whose popularity is at least equal to his, Arafat risks a popular uprising. If he does little or nothing, Israel will continue to destroy the physical remnants of his authority. If terrorist attacks against Israelis continue, whatever legitimacy Arafat still enjoys in the West will continue to shrivel.

Alarmed that the fresh crisis in the Middle East is approaching a boil, Roed-Larsen warned today of "total war" in the event that Arafat, unable to tackle Hamas, orders all-out attacks against Israel. A U.S. official dismissed the chances for such an eruption, but agreed that the potential is real for more destabilization if the violence between Palestinians and Israelis continues.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company