Word: palestinians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Later that week, a member of Hamas, the largest Palestinian Islamic group, nearly blew up a bus filled with the school-bound children of Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip. (An Israeli army jeep escorting the children cut him off, absorbing the blow of his 170-lb. car bomb. The bomber and one soldier died.) "[Arafat] was really panicking about it," said an official who saw him afterward. "Had it been the 40 schoolchildren, it would have been the end of the peace process as we know it." A Hamas splinter group, Islamic Jihad, made another go at that goal...
Arafat's satisfaction, however, was tempered when thousands of Palestinians rioted in the West Bank city of Ramallah two days after the signing ceremony. It had nothing to do with the agreement, about which ordinary Palestinians have shown indifference and skepticism. Instead, the unrest was the culmination of a feud between the Palestinian Authority's military intelligence, run by Musa Arafat, the chairman's cousin, and members of Fatah, Arafat's faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Musa Arafat's men had ransacked a Fatah office, and the provocation touched off a furious response, fed by growing frustration with...
...reaction was immediate. The next day, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, spiritual leader of Iran, called Arafat a "traitor" and a Zionist "lackey." Hassan Nasrallah, spiritual leader of Hizballah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia, followed suit, suggesting that Palestinians assassinate Arafat, just as Egyptian radicals had killed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In a leaflet faxed to reporters, the military wing of Hamas, breaking with its practice of eschewing internecine violence, accused Arafat of treason and warned that its activists, if pushed, might "direct their war and guns, out of necessity," against the Palestinian Authority...
...after the end of the Gulf standoff, and Bibi Netanyahu has a new excuse for delaying implementation of the Wye agreement. The Israeli leader on Monday suspended Israeli troop withdrawals from the West Bank until Yasser Arafat drops his long-standing plan to declare a Palestinian state next May. Netanyahu had found a number of reasons to delay implementation of the deal over the past month, but Washington's need for Arab support on the Iraq crisis -- articulated by President Clinton in a Tuesday-night phone call to Netanyahu -- created the pressure for him to secure the necessary cabinet vote...
...thinking behind Netanyahu's latest move may have been revealed by Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon Sunday night: Sharon told right-wing settlers that a Palestinian state wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for Israel, and then urged them to grab as much land as they can. "We'll expand the area," said Sharon. "Whatever is seized will be ours. Whatever isn't seized will end up in their hands." There's little the Israelis can realistically do to stop Arafat from declaring a state, but they'll do their best to restrict him to a Rorschach splatter hardly visible...