Arafat under seige in rubble of Ramallah

11.00pm - by JUSTIN HUGGLER

JERUSALEM - Great clouds of smoke and dust hung in the air over Ramallah on Saturday as the Israeli army began to blow up and bulldoze the buildings of Yasser Arafat's presidential compound.

They have already smashed Arafat's fleet of Mercedes, crunching them together into crude ramparts. They have surrounded the compound for more than a month at a time, trapping him inside without water or electricity.

Now Arafat is stuck inside his office building while the Isareli army takes apart all the surrounding buildings brick by brick. Today, according to aides who were with Arafat, the walls of his office were shaking as the buildings next door came crashing down.

This is the Israeli government's response to the return of suicide bombing, after six weeks without a serious militant attack in Israel. The death on Friday of a young Jewish man from Scotland, in Israel studying at a Jewish religious school, brought the death toll from Thursday's bus bombing in Tel Aviv to six. An Israeli policeman was killed in an earlier bombing on Wednesday.

There was a sense of déjà vu today. The Defence Minister announced that the policy was to isolate Arafat. The same policy was announced in the spring, when the Israelis kept Arafat holed up in the building for weeks, with no electricity or water, and ended up doing an interview for TV by candlelight.

This time, it seems, the isolation is to be even more complete, with his presidential compound dismantled around him.

But it is clear that the Israeli government is running out of options. An even stricter curfew than before was announced today for the northern West Bank - but Palestinian towns there have been under near constant curfew for months now, with people only allowed out to shop for a few hours every four to nine days.

The Israeli army is already in most of the West Bank towns. It has withdrawn from Bethlehem, but its troops still encircle it.

One way or another, Arafat has been confined to his now shrinking compound in Ramallah for most of this year. He has been humiliated by the Israeli army trapping him inside. And still the suicide bombers keep coming.

Ariel

is believed to favour expelling Arafat from the West Bank, probably to the Gaza Strip.

But his coalition partners are against this, and it appeared to have been ruled out at an emergency cabinet meeting late on Thursday night - the first

has called since March, just before he ordered a full-scale invasion of Palestinian-administered towns. The Defence Minister, Benjamin Ben Eliezer, said yesterday of Mr Arafat: "We have no intention of expelling him or firing at him. We want to isolate him."

The Israeli government is demanding the surrender of 19 alleged militants it says are in Arafat's building with him, including the head of West Bank intelligence, Tawfiq Tariri. Some 20 men surrendered overnight, it was not clear whether any were among the wanted 19.

During the six weeks of calm, Israelis were beginning to hope

's policy of reoccupying West Bank towns and placing them under curfew had worked and stopped the suicide bombers. But now the onus is on

's government to come up with something new.

Gaza remains a possibility. The Israeli army has not invaded or reoccupied the Gaza Strip and a planned invasion was called off earlier this year. It is believed there would be fierce resistance and bloody fighting in any Israeli attempt to reoccupy Gaza.

The Israeli army did make brief incursions into parts of the Gaza Strip yesterday, as it has been doing, but the soldiers withdrew after demolishing buildings they said were used to make weapons. A Palestinian policeman and two Palestinian civilians were killed, according to Palestinian sources.

The focus of Israel's response yesterday was, as ever, Arafat. But responsibility for this week's two suicide bombings was claimed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two major Islamic Palestinian militant groups. Mr Arafat is believed to have little power or influence to rein in either group.

Israeli officials, however, accuse him of not doing enough to prevent attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and even of encouraging them.

Mr Arafat has been calling for militant attacks on civilians in Israel to end for some time, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) which he heads condemned both this week's bombings.

- INDEPENDENT

Further reading:
Feature: Middle East

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