Bomb Hurts 50 in Israel; Arafat OKs U.S. Talks

A car bomb exploded Monday in an Israeli coastal town, injuring more than 50 people and increasing pressure on caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Barak to suspend peacemaking efforts even as Yasser Arafat headed for make-or-break talks with President Clinton in Washington.

The bombing deepened the already pervasive sense among Israelis and Palestinians that the violence that has claimed more than 350 lives in three months is spiraling out of control, and that there is little hope of signing an agreement in the final days of the Clinton administration.

Israel responded to the attack by tightening its military closure of Palestinian areas, closing the airport in the Gaza Strip and the Allenby Bridge linking the West Bank with Jordan, and announcing that only humanitarian goods will be allowed to cross into Gaza. It also barred Palestinian VIPs, who have free movement inside Israel and the Palestinian-controlled territories, from entering the Jewish state and said their movements will be restricted inside the West Bank and Gaza.

Clinton has been pressuring Arafat for a response to his proposals for a framework final peace agreement. The Palestinian leader has refused to say he will accept them as a basis for further talks.

Arafat spokesman Nabil abu Rudaineh said the Clinton-Arafat meeting set for today will determine the future of the peace process. Palestinian negotiator Yasser Abed-Rabbo told reporters in Gaza that Arafat wanted to clarify Clinton’s peace proposals during the meeting.

On the ground, the new year began much the way the old one ended--with blood flowing and calls for revenge filling the air. In the West Bank, Israeli troops killed two Palestinian police officers early Monday. Two other Palestinians, one of them a 10-year-old boy, died of gunshot wounds they suffered Sunday in separate incidents.

Also on Monday, an Associated Press cameraman filmed the wounding of a Palestinian man in footage broadcast repeatedly by Israel Television.

Thousands of armed men, their faces masked by kaffiyehs, paraded through Palestinian towns, marking the 36th anniversary of the first military operation of Fatah, Arafat’s faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. They vowed to continue fighting Israel and urged Arafat to reject U.S. plans.

In Netanya, about 20 miles north of Tel Aviv, a police officer ticketed a silver Suzuki sedan parked illegally on a main street sidewalk shortly before the car exploded about 7 p.m.

The blast reduced the sedan to a twisted hulk of steel, shattered shop windows and knocked passersby to the ground. Police said they believed that a homemade bomb weighing more than 20 pounds was planted in the back seat of the car and that the only person seriously injured in the blast may have been the bomber. Israel Radio said 54 people received medical treatment. Most were only slightly wounded or were suffering from shock.

Ambulances and emergency workers rushed to the scene, where people were screaming and crying in panic. The cries soon turned to calls of “Death to the Arabs!”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two militant Islamic organizations that reject a negotiated settlement with Israel, have carried out bombings recently and vowed to continue them in revenge for the deaths of Palestinians killed in the fighting that erupted in late September.

Army Told to Brace for an Escalation

“It is time to act,” said Yitzhak Levy, leader of Israel’s right-wing National Religious Party. “It is outrageous that we continue the negotiations while we are being attacked anywhere in the country. We should suspend the negotiations.”

Levy’s call was echoed by Deputy Prime Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a Barak confidant. “This attack is a serious attack, so serious that as far as I am concerned, we should stop everything and think about where we go from here,” Ben-Eliezer said.

Hours before the blast, Barak told the army general staff to prepare for the possibility of a regional war with the Palestinians if Arafat refuses to respond positively to Clinton’s proposals by next week.

Barak warned that Fatah might carry out attacks inside the borders of pre-1967 Israel, something it has refrained from doing since the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993. In that agreement, Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.

Arafat held a long telephone conversation with Clinton on Monday. The president has asked both Barak and Arafat to accept his proposals as the basis for further negotiations. The Israeli Cabinet did so, but with some reservations. Palestinians have requested clarification, which Clinton has declined to provide.

Barak is under increasing pressure to abandon efforts at peacemaking regardless of Arafat’s response to Clinton.

Israeli radio reported Monday that Atty. Gen. Elyakim Rubinstein wrote a letter last week telling Barak that while it is legal for a caretaker prime minister to negotiate an agreement, it is inappropriate to do so amid an election campaign. Israel will hold new elections for prime minister Feb. 6.

Leaders of the Likud Party immediately called on Barak to halt the negotiations.

Barak’s office insisted, however, that as long as Rubinstein did not say negotiations were illegal, Barak has an obligation to continue working for an agreement. Barak resigned as prime minister last month after losing his majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, triggering a special election in which he will face the hawkish head of the Likud, Ariel Sharon.

The core of Clinton’s plan calls for Israel to relinquish sovereignty over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, in return for the Palestinians’ abandoning their demand that millions of refugees and their descendants who lost their homes when the Jewish state was born be allowed to return to their properties. Israel would cede between 94% and 96% of the West Bank to the Palestinians and annex land with large settlement blocks. The Palestinians would secure an independent state.

Arafat is being pressured by Fatah and ordinary citizens to reject the proposals as failing to ensure Palestinian rights.

Members of Israel’s security establishment warned Monday that they expect an escalation of violence in the wake of Sunday’s shooting of the son and daughter-in-law of the late Meir Kahane, the extremist U.S. rabbi. The settlers were killed in a drive-by shooting that also injured five of their children.

Binyamin Kahane’s death triggered calls for revenge from settlers, who rampaged through the streets of Jerusalem during his funeral procession Sunday night.

On Monday, hundreds of West Bank settlers blocked roads and vowed to secure the byways themselves if the army cannot stop the drive-by shootings that have become an almost daily occurrence. The security establishment warned the government that the far-right fringe of the settler movement may be planning a large-scale or dramatic act of revenge that could include attacking the Muslim mosques built atop the Temple Mount, a site known to Muslims as the Haram al Sharif (“noble sanctuary”), or even the assassination of senior Israeli officials.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing activist in 1995. The assassin, Yigal Amir, said he killed the prime minister because Rabin ceded territory to the Palestinians.

“Last night at the funeral, the Kahanists pasted stickers with a new wish: ‘War Now,’ ” wrote Nahum Barnea in the mass-circulation daily Yediot Aharonot. “It looks like this is one Kahane wish that is likely to come true.”

The new year began with overnight gun battles in the West Bank. Israeli troops killed two Palestinian police officers in a shootout on the outskirts of Tulkarm, in the northern West Bank.

A 10-year-old boy died of injuries he suffered Sunday when he was caught in a cross-fire between Palestinian gunmen and soldiers in the southern West Bank town of Hebron. A 22-year-old who Palestinians said was shot in the head Sunday in the village of Hizma, near Jerusalem, by Jewish settlers, also died of his wounds.

Victim Apparently Violated Curfew

Israelis saw footage on their nightly news of the wounding of Jadallah Jabari, a 50-year-old retired garbage collector, by an Israeli soldier in Hebron. Palestinian residents of the town, where 400 Jewish settlers live in heavily guarded strongholds, have been under curfew for weeks. Jabari apparently was violating that curfew when he approached a soldier at a barricade in the morning, asking to pass.

An AP cameraman filmed the soldier asking Jabari where he was going, then turned away, then swung the camera back as two shots rang out and Jabari, now on the ground bleeding profusely, one foot almost severed, began to scream. The army said Jabari was taken to an Israeli hospital for treatment and that the incident was being investigated.