Word: gaza
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...wonderful day for Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. On Friday the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, along with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, were named the recipients of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, the highest trophy politicians can hope for. Yet there was no jubilation in Tel Aviv or Gaza City. The honor had been spoiled by tortured and ultimately fruitless attempts by both Palestinians and Israelis to avoid a tragedy. The poignance and pitilessness of lives well below the heights of power had overshadowed political priorities, and the 13-month effort to implement peace was thrown into its worst...
...activists from the militant Islamic movement Hamas. Two days later they named their ransom: the release from Israeli jails of their spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin and 200 other Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners. Waxman was hardly the first Israeli to be taken hostage. Fundamentalists from the West Bank and Gaza Strip have seized nine others during the past five years, killing all of them. But there was a difference this time. The kidnappers had distributed a wrenching videotape of a terrified Waxman asking the government to meet his captors' demands. On tape the youth looked dazed and frightened...
Rabin was already frustrated by persistent militant attacks despite Israel's / withdrawal from the self-rule zones in the Gaza Strip and Jericho last May. Islamic extremists, who oppose Arafat's peace agreement with Israel and hope to sabotage it through violence, are concentrated in the Strip and use the newly autonomous area as a sanctuary. Says a Hamas activist in Gaza City: "Before, the Israeli army would chase our fighters, besiege their hideouts and catch them. Now those fighting the jihad can attack and then go back to their homes." Arafat's administration has been reluctant to confront...
Rabin insisted that his information made it clear that Waxman was being held in Gaza, over which Arafat was responsible. And so the Israeli Prime Minister made the kidnapping an issue of Arafat's authority and good faith and held the Palestinian leader "completely responsible" for the soldier's well-being. A further expansion of Palestinian self-rule, he said, rested on Waxman's safe release. Even as Israel's leader congratulated his Palestinian counterpart on the Nobel Prize, he issued a warning: "If there will not be security, there will also not be peace...
Launching an unprecedented search for the captive soldier, the Palestinian chief mobilized virtually his entire 9,500-strong security force in the Gaza Strip, setting up new roadblocks, searching hideouts and rounding up 300 Hamas activists. But they were shaking the wrong tree. On Friday morning the Israelis received intelligence that the captive was in a house in Bir-Nabala, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, just three miles north of his parents' home in Ramot, a Jerusalem suburb. Throughout the day, Rabin said later, the Israelis considered a tentative Hamas proposal to exchange Waxman for Sheik Yassin, whom...