Sharon ready to react to the latest suicide massacre

TEL AVIV – Too little and too late: Yasser Arafat has ordered his security forces to prevent other terrorist attacks, but in the aftermath of the last suicide bombing south of Tel Aviv, which resulted in 16 Israeli victims, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon prepares a very strict response. And so, on arrival in the evening in Tel Aviv from the US, the prime minister immediately gathered, already at the airport, the defense council of his government, while the army is ready to unleash a new and even more massive offensive in the Palestinian territories. Operation that could also reach the Gaza strip, spared from the “Wall of defense” operation taken on March 29 in the West Bank.

And meanwhile, in the story of the Palestinian “prisoners” in the Basilica of Nativity in Bethlehem, we continue to compromise: in sight there seems to be an imminent improvement. The approximately 35 militants who should be escorted to Gaza, before being prosecuted by the PA, could leave – according to information coming from the city – at very short notice. While among the 13 considered by the Israeli government the most dangerous the parties in cause, together with Europe and the United States, continue to seek a solution, one or more countries in which to transfer them after the Italian “no” to host them all.

But back to the response to the latest suicide bombing. Starting with the fate of Yasser Arafat. The Israeli premier seems to have ruled out his eventual expulsion from the Territories (hypothesis circulated during the day), and he said that – in talks with US President George W. Bush, interrupted last night by the news of the attack – he would have agreed ” to deprive ” the Palestinian president. Arafat, according to sources following Sharon, should therefore be relegated to a “symbolic position”, and the “administrative responsibilities” in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) would be “transferred to others”. Only at that point, the sources added, would Israel be ready to start peace negotiations.

And meanwhile, after yesterday’s bloody one, another suicide massacre went empty this morning at a bus stop at the Megiddo intersection, near the Arab Israeli town of Afula (north of Tel Aviv), crowded with Israeli soldiers. The suicide bomber, now hospitalized at the end of his life, set off the charge he hid in a backpack before his time, and only one soldier was slightly wounded.

A terrorist initiative attempted on the very day that Arafat, who emerged just a week ago from the rubble of his headquarters in Ramallah after more than a month of Israeli siege, had said harsh words: “The groups that conduct similar actions work against the interests of the Palestinians and every possible measure will be adopted against them to put an end to these grave violations “, the PNA leadership stated. Later, Arafat also announced that he had ordered his security forces to “prevent any terrorist attack against Israeli civilians, whatever the Palestinian group involved”. Order reiterated firsthand to Palestinian TV.

In the Moqata, his half-destroyed headquarters in Ramallah, Arafat’s bodyguards returned to piling up sandbags in the evening waiting for a new Israeli attack and eight pacifists – including five Israelis and an Italian – returned to being “human shields” for the Palestinian president, as in the days of the long siege. And an imminent Israeli offensive also appears to be taken for granted in the Gaza Strip, the Hamas stronghold.

May 8, 2002