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March 23, 2001/Adar 28, 5761, Vol. 53, No.25
Three Palestinian attacks greet Sharon
DAVID LANDAU
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Israel seemed to be holding its breath this week in the wake of three Palestinian attacks.
The reaction stemmed from a sense that the moment of reckoning is at hand as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon returns from his first trip to Washington to meet with President Bush and other U.S. officials.
It's hard to call the six weeks since Sharon's election a honeymoon - the Palestinians have done their best to greet him with violence - but the sense here is that this was about as warm a reception as Sharon is going to get.
The premier was due back in Israel by last weekend, amid speculation that Israel's pent-up fury would then be unleashed.
If reprisals do occur, they would be the first manifestation of a toughened reprisal policy under the new government. If they do not, the inaction may be a clue of Sharon's intentions and how he has been impacted by the Bush administration's calls for restraint.
The first of this week's attacks took place at Kibbutz Manara on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Several days after the man responsible for security on the kibbutz, Yitzhak Kvartatz, disappeared, he was found murdered in a nearby riverbed. Manara's arsenal had been ransacked and some 60 rifles and handguns stolen.
The Lebanon border fence, just yards away, was not cut, leading investigators to assume that Palestinian or Israeli Arab terrorists were responsible for the attack.
The second attack came March 18, when Palestinian militants fired three mortar bombs from the Gaza Strip into Israel - the first time Palestinians had fired from Gaza into Israel proper since the violence began nearly six months ago.
An Israeli reserve soldier was lightly wounded by the shells, which landed in an army base next to Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
Israel Defense Force sources said the shells came from places in or near Palestinian Authority police installations. The implication is that the shells could not have been fired without the connivance, or at least deliberate indifference, of the Palestinian police - who were ordered an hour before the attack to take cover for fear of Israeli retaliation.
The third attack came March 19, when an Israeli driver was killed in a drive-by shooting near Bethlehem. After being shot, 58-year-old Baruch Cohen, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Efrat, lost control of his car and hit an oncoming truck.
Israeli officials believe the assailants escaped to Bethlehem, passing at least two Palestinian Authority roadblocks along the way.
Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said the "finger of guilt" points directly at Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Both Sharon in the United States and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in Jerusalem cited these incidents as proof of Israeli claims that the Palestinian Authority, through its military and paramilitary units, is not just indirectly responsible but directly involved in attacks on Israelis.
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