Palestinian Security Hits Hamas
Intensifying their crackdown on Islamic militants, Palestinian police today cut the telephone lines of detained Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin and the group's leading activists.
Security officials also said that more than 100 Hamas activists have been arrested since Thursday's suicide attack on an Israeli school bus.
Palestinian security chiefs Friday joined in investigating the bomb attack and promised complete cooperation, reports CBS News correspondent Jesse Schulman.
If the Palestinians don't continue their security crackdown, their chances of getting more West Bank land handed over are slim to none. This is the toughest test of the Washington accord thus far. It's unlikely to be the last or the worst.
The decision to cut Yassin's ties to the outside world came after Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat huddled with his security chiefs early today to chart the next stage of the campaign against Hamas that Israel says is a precondition for a timely West Bank troop withdrawal.
Armed Palestinian policemen and plainclothes agents blocked the sandy streets leading to Yassin's Gaza City home today and ordered journalists to leave the area.
Yassin, a quadriplegic since his teens, has been under house arrest since Thursday evening. It was a stunning move by Arafat, who in the year since Yassin's release from an Israeli jail has bent over backward to avoid open conflict with him.
In the West Bank town of Nablus, meanwhile, Palestinian police prevented Hamas from staging a march to protest the arrests.
Arafat has moved against Hamas in the past, sometimes arresting hundreds of activists in retaliation for suicide attacks against Israel. However, the current crackdown marked the first time Arafat has had the entire Hamas leadership arrested and silenced.
Arafat ordered the arrests in response to the suicide attack at a busy Gaza junction in which an Islamic militant rammed an explosives-laden car into an Israeli army jeep escorting a red-and-white bus carrying Israeli school children.
The 40 students on board were saved. Not a single one was hurt. But the car bomb killed an Israeli soldier in the jeep, a 19-year-old immigrant from Ukraine who is now being praised as a fallen hero. The assailant also died, and his identity remained a mystery. The car was registered to a man from the Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis, who said he had sold it a day before the attack.
Political reverberations from the first suicide attack on Israelis in six months were swift.
Coming only six days after the signing of a land-for-security agreement in Washington, it was a destabilizing new factor in what is already a highly delicate prelude to implementing the accord. That process is to start next week.
Blocking the pact is the avowed goal of Hamas, which bitterly opposes any peace with Israel. Hamas has carried out attacks that have killed scores of Israelis.
Israel's government said it was too early to judge Arafat's campaign against Hmas. "If this is a harbinger of a new policy, then we would certainly welcome it. If it's a repeat of short-term, sporadic activity against Hamas, then we still have a very severe problem," said government spokesman Moshe Fogel.
Fogel said Palestinian security forces must confiscate illegal weapons and dismantle the infrastructure of the Hamas military wing, Izzedine al Qassam.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Arafat that the Palestinians would have to wage all-out war against terrorists if they wanted Israel to withdraw troops in the West Bank, as stipulated in the agreement.
Earlier this week, Netanyahu indefinitely postponed a Cabinet session that was to ratify the peace agreement. Officials in his office said the regular weekly Cabinet session would be held Sunday, as planned, but that the peace agreement would only be discussed if the Palestinians submit a detailed security plan to the Americans by then.
Palestinian negotiator Hassan Asfour said the plan would be presented to the Americans on Monday, as initially stipulated.
There were some signs that Thursday's bombings had not harmed the fragile new relationship between the Netanyahu government and the Palestinian Authority too badly.
Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon is to meet next week with Arafat's deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, in what Israel radio described as the beginning of negotiations on a permanent peace agreement.
Sharon's spokesman, Raanan Gissin, confirmed that the meeting was planned, but said that "we won't label it the beginning of final status talks."
The negotiations were formally launched in May 1996, but were suspended when Netanyahu took office later that month.