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One Killed as Israel Renews Onslaught; Arab League Weighs Boycott
NABLUS, West Bank, Dec. 20 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - One Palestinian was killed in a firefight with invading Israeli forces, who moved back into a suburb of the West Bank City of Nablus just hours after they pulled out, according to Palestinian officials.
And in Cairo, the 22-member Arab League met to consider reactivating a total boycott of the Jewish state in response to Israel's ongoing military campaign against the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
Israeli tanks and armored cars again invaded Palestinian-ruled areas of west Nablus they had quit in the morning, although the army said the movement had been a "tactical change" and not an official withdrawal.
Tanks also returned to a West Bank village evacuated hours earlier.
The withdrawal had been an apparent sign that the security situation had improved slightly after a dramatic drop in violence following Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's peace call on Sunday.
But the clashes and the killing - the first since Monday - ruptured the peace.
Arafat, apparently getting tough on Islamic activists defying his call for a ceasefire with Israel, sent his police in pre-dawn hours Thursday to arrest a senior official of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in Gaza City.
Seven people were injured when police clashed with armed protestors as they tried to arrest Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi.
Weeks of knife-edge tensions had scaled down late Wednesday as Israeli and Palestinian officials held their first joint security meeting since U.S. peace envoy, retired Marine General Anthony C. Zinni, was recalled to Washington.
The Palestinians called the meeting a "failure," but Israeli officials said it had gone well. They moved their forces out of west Nablus and the West Bank village of At Tira and Beitunya, but later sent them back in. No forces returned to Beitunya, however.
The areas had been stormed after Hamas bombers killed 26 people and wounded 200 more in Jerusalem and Haifa at the beginning of the month.
Hamas, squeezed by a Palestinian police crackdown after Arafat came under intense Israeli attacks and E.U. and U.S. diplomatic pressure to curb extremist violence, said late Wednesday it was halting its devastating attacks against Israel. But Thursday, other Hamas officials denied that it ordered a halt in military operations against Israel.
Palestinian police made a surprise swoop on Rantissi's house, but were confronted with hundreds of Hamas loyalists summoned to form a human shield by appeals broadcast from minarets of local mosques.
Gunfire broke out around the house and police pulled back from the scene, closing off streets and pumping in hundreds of reinforcements.
A police statement said two officers and five civilians were wounded in the shoot-out, though Rantissi remained with his family in their home, unhurt and issuing defiant messages.
Rantissi told AFP by phone during the siege: "I am refusing to be arrested by order of the CIA [Central Intelligence
Agency] and the Israeli [secret service] Mossad. There was a security meeting, and then they came to arrest me."
He said he believed Israel had him earmarked for assassination, after a spate of assassinations against more than 60 Hamas members.
The large police presence left hours later, Hamas supporters said, stressing that they had stockpiled rocks to throw if they came back.
The police operation came just hours after top Israeli and Palestinian security officials held a hush-hush meeting in the West Bank, the first in more than a week.
The move marked a thaw in ties between the two sides, which reached an all-time low in 15 months of hostilities last week when Israel's hardline prime minister, Ariel Sharon, cut all ties with Arafat. He accused the Palestinian leader of failing to prevent attacks.
But Sharon himself ordered his security officials to resume contact with their Palestinian counterparts, as Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Israel was willing to relax its stranglehold around Palestinian cities, if Palestinian police moved in and guaranteed the truce Arafat called for in a national address Sunday.
While Sharon made no official comment on Arafat's more resolute crackdown on activists - which included the closure of almost 40 Hamas offices and the arrest of 12 security officials accused of violating his truce orders - the withdrawals appeared to be an acknowledgement of the improved situation.
"Potentially, it's a turning point,'' U.N. Middle East Envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said, adding that the situation remained fragile.
Nevertheless, Israeli forces swooped on other Palestinian areas in the West Bank, making 11 arrests in raids unopposed by Arafat's security forces.
Hamas' switch of tactics had been predicted earlier in the week by the Israeli defense establishment, which said the movement would likely turn from the attacks that have brought international opprobrium to attacking Israeli officials or strategic targets.
Meanwhile in Cairo, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa proposed boycotting Sharon in return for his decision to shun Arafat, whom the Israeli leader called "irrelevant."
Sixteen out of 22 Arab foreign ministers were meeting at the Arab League headquarters in the Egyptian capital at the request of the Palestinians to adopt a unified position towards Israel.
The meeting was called after Israel launched numerous assaults against Palestinian Authority targets and confined Arafat to virtual house arrest in the West Bank town of Ramallah in reaction to attacks launched by Palestinian activist groups.
In a draft of the meeting's final communiqué, submitted to ministers during informal meetings in the afternoon and debated behind closed doors in the evening, Moussa proposed a boycott of Sharon.
"The Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs calls for the complete cessation of political contacts with the Israeli prime minister," Mussa's draft said. "Israel's boycott, or its ignoring Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, means the Arab countries should take the same decision concerning Sharon," said the draft.
"If Sharon does not see President Arafat as a partner in the peace process, the Arab countries do not see in Sharon a partner worthy of trust, and do not see any use in pursuing contacts with him," the text continues.
Moussa also proposed that the meeting decide that, "the people of the Arab countries stop dealing economically with Israel in any form, and boycott Israeli products in any market, especially the products of the [Israeli] settlements, so long as the Israeli policies of aggression, of assassination, of state terrorism continue."
The draft also calls on the Palestinian people and all their organizations to "unite" with the Palestinian Authority, an allusion to simmering tensions in the territories with movements such as Hamas, the principle author of strikes against Israel.
Syria, meanwhile, has demanded that Arab countries break all relations with Israel and show their support for the continuation of the Palestinian uprising, according to its own draft communiqué.
Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel in 1979 and 1994, respectively.
Syria also called on the meeting to "affirm its refusal to mix terrorism with the rights of the Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian people to resist the Israeli occupation," the text adds.
Palestinian delegates also submitted a report stating that the Palestinian Authority must address the United Nations General Assembly to obtain "international protection for the Palestinian people" after the United States vetoed an Arab-proposed resolution on the Middle East calling for international observers in the region.
The Palestinian Authority "calls upon the international community to rapidly send international observers to the Palestinian territories," the Palestinian report said.
Since the weekend, Palestinian police have shut down more than two-dozen offices linked to Hamas and its smaller sister group, Islamic Jihad.
On Wednesday, the Palestinian Authority announced it detained 15 members of its own security service for defying orders to stop attacks on Israelis. The detainees belong to militias affiliated with Arafat's Fatah movement.
Late Wednesday, Palestinian police said they arrested 13 suspected Hamas members and shut down five metal workshops in the Gaza Strip on suspicion they were manufacturing mortar shells. Three owners were arrested, police said.
Hamas and other activist groups have said they would not observe a truce, and a recent opinion poll indicated that only about one-third of Palestinians support a ceasefire.
In the Khan Younis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, about 3,000 people, including many Fatah supporters, marched in support of Arafat on Thursday. About 200 gunmen led the procession, firing in the air and waving Arafat pictures.
Mohammed Kayed, a leader of the local Abu Rish militia linked to Fatah, said he and his men would not permit anyone to defy Arafat. In the past 15 months of fighting, the Abu Rish militia was involved in repeated shooting attacks on Israelis.
Also on Thursday, Israel's Labor Party cabinet ministers informed Sharon that the party would withdraw from the government if a bill calling for the cancellation of the Oslo peace accords was raised at a forthcoming cabinet meeting.
Peres told his Labor colleagues that he had been informed that Minister without Portfolio Danny Naveh (Likud) intended to put forward the bill either at the next cabinet meeting or the one after.
The Israeli foreign minister said that merely proposing the bill would be "a grave violation of the coalition agreement" between the government and Labor.
In response to the ministers' decision, Naveh said that he would continue to push for the bill, because, he said, "Peres is the only one who doesn't understand that Oslo is over."
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