Word: netanyahu
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When Arafat phoned Netanyahu an hour after the bombing to express his condolences, he received a furious dressing down. In a conversation Netanyahu's office called "difficult and pointed," the Prime Minister accused Arafat of having "encouraged the violence" by refusing to act against the Islamists. "You must change your policy 180 degrees," he insisted...
...Netanyahu indefinitely closed Israel's borders to all Palestinians, putting some 100,000 day laborers out of work. He banned travel within the West Bank, cooping up Palestinians in their hometowns and handicapping normal commerce. For the first time, the Israeli government said it would stop paying out several million dollars it owes the Palestinian Authority in tax refunds. The Israelis also decided to jam broadcasts of the Palestinian Authority's official Voice of Palestine radio station, whose transmissions have recently been filled with anti-Israeli invective...
Taking on terror suspects directly, the Israeli government issued an arrest warrant for Palestinian police chief Ghazi Jabali, whom the Israelis accuse of inciting an attack on a Jewish settlement in the West Bank last month. Most ominously, Netanyahu's government warned that if Arafat didn't neutralize activists, Israel would send its forces back into areas now under Palestinian self-rule to do the job. That would be a blatant violation of the Israeli-Palestinian accords. "You're not going to see tanks or columns of soldiers going inside," says a senior Israeli officer in the West Bank...
Arafat may not see much to gain by bowing to Israel's demands, since he does not trust Netanyahu to proceed with expanding self-rule in return. Says an Arafat confidant: "He basically thinks nothing is possible with Netanyahu." The feeling, of course, is mutual. Even under the Labor Party, which reached the Oslo accords with Arafat, mutual violations of the provisions were common. But then the two leaderships had a solid relationship, providing a base more valuable than the written documents for peace to grow. Now it's gone...
JERUSALEM: The war of words between Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat continues to heat up, and US special envoy Dennis Ross is flying in to cool things down. He may have his work cut out -- a very real mini-war has already exploded along Israel's northern border...