Arafat Eyes Freedom

A deal's in place to allow Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to go free and finally leave his headquarters in Ramallah, surrounded for weeks by Israeli troops.

But it won't take effect until some final details are ironed out, and prisoners inside the Ramallah headquarters - and wanted by Israel - have been transferred to a Palestinian jail.

Separately, the standoff continues at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and Israel has again said no deal to the United Nations on the details of the way the U.N. wants to conduct a fact-finding mission on war crimes allegations connected with the fighting earlier this month in the Jenin refugee camp.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, troops kept a tight grip on Hebron, a city they reoccupied on Monday, and raided two more villages overnight, defying repeated U.S. calls for an end to such incursions.

The Israeli cabinet said Tuesday that it cannot cooperate with the U.N. fact-finding panel, because its objections on the way the probe will be conducted have still not been resolved.

A cabinet statement, quoted by Israel Radio, said Israel had raised with the United Nations the issues that had to be resolved for a "fair review of Jenin," where Palestinians say war crimes took place during a two-week assault by the Israeli army.

"As long as these terms have not been fulfilled there is no possibility of commencing the review," the radio quoted the statement as saying. It did not say which terms were unmet.

Israel denies that war crimes or a massacre took place in the camp, scene of the fiercest fighting in its month-old West Bank offensive. It says the camp was a stronghold for militant factions which used it to launch 23 suicide attacks on Israel.

Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo denounced the cabinet decision, saying Palestinians would demand that the U.N. Security Council impose sanctions against Israel.

"The decision, in itself, is a war crime against the Palestinian people and confirms that massacres have been perpetrated at Jenin camp," said Abed Rabbo.

Israel, which initially accepted the U.N. probe, has since objected to its make-up and mandate, fearing the mission will put it in the dock and possibly expose soldiers to prosecution.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, demanded that the mission make only "findings," not "observations," the U.N. term for conclusions.

The U.N. Security Council had held off action on the Jenin mission on Monday, awaiting the Israeli cabinet decision. The U.N. team has been cooling its heels in Geneva for a week.

As Israel stonewalled the United Nations, it accepted a U.S. plan to end Arafat's confinement, under which wanted militants holed up in his compound will be moved to a Palestinian prison where U.S. and British personnel will supervise their detention.

U.S. and British experts were to hold a second day of talks with officials at Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah to discuss details of the deal proposed by President Bush.

Once the arrangement is in place, Israeli tanks are to leave Ramallah, letting Arafat move freely for the first time since Israel imposed travel curbs on him in December.

"We have agreed to move the people to a Palestinian prison, most likely in Jericho," a senior Palestinian official said.

A spokesman at the British consulate in Jerusalem confirmed the men would be held at a Jericho prison built during the British mandate over Palestine in the 1930s.

He said the U.S. and British guards will probably be unarmed. Their exact number is still being worked out.

Israel, shrugging off fresh U.S. calls for an end to its military operations in Palestinian-ruled areas, sent tanks hurtling into the villages of Shawara, east of Bethlehem, and Silat al-Harthiyeh, near Jenin, in brief overnight raids.

The army said it had detained six Palestinians in its overnight raid on Shawara, three of them on its wanted list.

A local Palestinian official said troops had seized nine people, including a policeman and a member of Arafat's Force 17 presidential guard, before withdrawing.

Residents in Silat al-Harthiyeh said troops had detained four supporters of Arafat's Fatah faction before pulling out.

Tanks and troops maintained a strong presence in the divided West Bank city of Hebron after killing nine people there on Monday. The army said it had detained 115 Palestinians, including 18 on its wanted list, but freed most of them.

Military sources said Israeli troops are likely to leave Hebron very soon. They entered Hebron on Monday, an incursion military sources say was directly triggered by Saturday's attack by Palestinian gunmen on a Jewish settlement near Hebron, in which four Israelis were killed, including a five-year-old girl.

Troops kept up their siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, where some 30 wanted militants are holed up.

Bethlehem mayor Hanna Nasser says the two sides are negotiating over Palestinian demands for food to be delivered to the church and for a group of civilians to be allowed to leave.

An Israeli sniper killed a Palestinian militant in a garden of the church, one of Christianity's holiest sites, on Monday.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Israel should "finish its withdrawal" from reoccupied Palestinian areas and "refrain from further incursions."

At least 1,327 Palestinians and 458 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation started in September 2000 after peace negotiations stalled.