Israel renewed its threat yesterday to remove Yasser Arafat but hinted it had delayed taking action against the Palestinian president to avoid complicating a planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said on Army Radio that a security Cabinet decision of a year ago to expel Arafat "is still valid today" and that Israel would "find the way and right timing to bring about Arafat's removal from the area". Senior Israeli officials have reaffirmed the threat against Arafat several times before, but political sources say such a move is all but impossible as long as the United States, Israel's main ally, strongly opposes it.
Israel drew international condemnation last September when it decided "in principle" to remove Arafat, confined to his battered headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah for more than two and a half years. But the Cabinet set no date. Mofaz called Arafat an "obstacle to any future (peace) process", in comments broadcast six days after Palestinian suicide bombers killed 16 people on two buses in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba. Asked why Israel has delayed implementing the decision against Arafat, Mofaz implied this was to avoid aggravating tensions that could disrupt a plan to evacuate Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip next year. "What guides us now ... is firstly to carry out the disengagement plan," Mofaz said.
Mofaz also announced plans to build a second network of fences around settlements in the south of the West Bank in addition to the larger separation wall which is being constructed across the territory. Mofaz told the radio that a 10-kilometer section of the original route of the larger wall, which would have incorporated the settlements in the Hebron area, had been modified after a recent Supreme Court decision. |