Arafat Tours Ruins; Church Siege Goes On

RAMALLAH, West Bank — No longer under Israeli siege, Yasser Arafat toured the wreckage of this city Thursday, praying over a mass grave and pretending to patch a cracked wall to symbolize the massive reconstruction effort that lies ahead.

The Palestinian Authority president’s first day of freedom was a series of photo ops at schools and office buildings destroyed by the recently departed Israeli army. But any euphoria among the smallish crowds was tempered by the harsh realities Arafat faces--and by the festering standoff at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Israel lifted its monthlong siege of Arafat’s headquarters here in the middle of the night Wednesday, pulling the last of its tanks and troops away from Arafat’s headquarters and redeploying them on the outskirts of Ramallah. The government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had said it was imposing the siege to force Arafat to rein in terrorists.

At midmorning, a pale Arafat flashed a “V” for victory and emerged defiantly from the compound, most of which lies in ruins, then speeded away in a convoy of security vehicles as crowds who had gathered to see him cheered in support.

First stop was a grave in the parking lot of Ramallah Hospital, where 17 people killed during the Israeli invasion lay buried. They died during the siege, and when their families could not reach a real cemetery, they were laid to rest en masse instead.

Arafat said brief Muslim prayers over the grave.

In Bethlehem on Thursday, Israeli troops shot dead one man and injured two others at the entrance to the Church of the Nativity as talks stalled over the fate of gunmen holed up inside. An army spokeswoman said the men were shot because they were spotted carrying guns.

Peace Activists

Carry In Food

Several hours after the shooting, peace activists with the International Solidarity Movement, and a Los Angeles Times photographer, eluded troops besieging the church and dashed, with their hands up, to its wooden door. As one activist unfurled a banner saying “Free Palestine,” the door swung open. Ten members of the group carried in backpacks stuffed with rice, lentils, chocolate, sugar and other food.

The activists’ presence promised to further complicate an already fraught impasse in which the Israeli army has encircled one of Christianity’s most revered sites and confined thousands in the biblical town to their homes for a month.

Among the activists are Nauman Zaidi, 26, from Rancho Cucamonga, and Robert O’Neill, 21, from Claremont. Zaidi, a student at UC Riverside, and O’Neill, a student at UC Berkeley, are studying this year at American University in Cairo, Zaidi said in a telephone interview from the church. The two are spending their spring break working as volunteers for the International Solidarity Movement, he said. The group’s Web site, www.palsolidarity.org, says it aims to raise awareness of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and for an end to Israeli occupation.

Carolyn Cole, the Times photographer, said the Palestinians barricaded inside the church warmly received the activists and immediately began cooking a large pot of rice from among the stores the newcomers brought.

She said the men inside were broken up into small groups around the 4th century basilica, where they are sleeping on blankets spread on the stone floor. Cole said windows inside the church had been shot out but that no serious damage was visible.

The cavernous structure was illuminated by candles, she said, and the men inside said they had been eating leaves from a lemon tree in the courtyard as their rations ran out.

“You are welcome,” a pharmacist who identified himself only as Aziz told the activists. “But you are free to go if you want.”

Arafat seemed obsessed with Bethlehem in the first hours after his own siege was lifted. He lashed out at Israel, which he blamed for two fires that erupted during a Wednesday night gun battle at the church.

The Palestinians said the fires were ignited by Israeli flares shot into the compound during the fighting. The Israelis initially accused the Palestinians of setting the blazes, but Col. Miri Eisen, an Israeli military intelligence officer, said Thursday that the army was checking the possibility that its flares had indeed started the fires.

Arafat also commented Thursday on the Jenin refugee camp, site of fierce fighting that claimed the lives of at least 50 Palestinian gunmen and civilians and 23 Israeli soldiers. Israel has refused to allow an independent inquiry by the United Nations, which it regards as biased. Arafat said it was disgraceful that the U.N. team won’t be allowed into Jenin.

‘We Will Really Have

to Rebuild From Zero’

In his inspection of Ramallah, Arafat paid quick visits to the Education Ministry, the sprawling Preventive Security Service complex and other Palestinian Authority buildings that Israeli forces destroyed or damaged in what Palestinians charge was a clear attempt to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“We will really have to rebuild from zero,” said Salah Zuheikeh, a senior official in Arafat’s Fatah movement.

He stood amid the rubble of Arafat’s headquarters, where repeated Israeli bombardment, tank fire and bulldozing had smashed nearly every structure. Inside a garage, Israeli soldiers had methodically attacked each of Arafat’s six Mercedes-Benzes and three Jeep Cherokees.

At the Ramallah Hospital and its adjacent Sheik Zayed Hospital, Arafat greeted members of his bodyguard unit who were wounded in fighting. Dr. Samir Saliba said the 72-year-old Palestinian leader looked tired and pale, having lost weight, but that his overall health seemed good.

The virtual destruction of the Palestinian Authority and Arafat’s desire to rebuild have helped fuel new demands for major reform in a regime widely viewed as corrupt and inefficient.

“No one can know what Abu Ammar is thinking,” Saliba said, using Arafat’s nom de guerre, “but everyone on the street is demanding new faces and new blood.”

From the opposite end of the political spectrum, however, Arafat is coming under enormous criticism for the deal he struck to secure his freedom.

He agreed to allow six men who had been hiding with him in his compound to be transported to a Palestinian prison in the West Bank town of Jericho, where they are being monitored by U.S. and British wardens. The six include four people convicted in the fatal shooting of Rehavam Zeevi, an extreme right-wing minister in Sharon’s Cabinet.

At a town hall meeting Thursday of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whose members ordered and executed the Zeevi assassination, posters saluted the killers as heroes and demanded their release from the clutches of “CIA collaborators, their agents and ideologues.”

In Bethlehem, the foreign activists said they intend to stay inside the church until the siege is lifted and all the Palestinians and others inside--more than 100 people--are allowed to go free.

Bethlehem Mayor Hanna Nasser said Thursday night that the army has told Palestinian negotiators that seven wanted militants are inside the church.

Nasser said the Palestinian negotiators want those men transferred to Jericho, where he said they will stand trial if the Palestinian Authority decides they have committed crimes. If convicted, the men could be held in a Palestinian jail under British and U.S. supervision, like the other group of men sent to Jericho.

Nasser said a third party should step in to handle the negotiations, and he has invited Vatican envoy French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray to visit Bethlehem. Etchegaray met Thursday with Israeli President Moshe Katsav and with Arafat in an effort to break the deadlock over the church.

In another development Thursday, the Israeli prime minister’s office said that Marwan Barghouti, the top Fatah commander in the West Bank, who was captured by Israeli forces last month, has told his interrogators that Arafat personally approved attacks on Israelis.

Barghouti is the highest-ranking Palestinian leader to be taken into custody during Israel’s recent sweep through the West Bank. Since his April 15 capture, he has complained that he has been permitted only short periods of sleep and has been questioned round the clock for days at a time.

In a statement, the prime minister’s office said Barghouti told Israel’s Shin Bet secret service that when a militiaman wanted to carry out an attack, he had to fill out a detailed request and hand it in to Barghouti, who would sign it and pass it along to Arafat for final approval, the statement said. Also, Arafat had to approve every outlay of funds, whatever the amount.

Israel has been trying to mount a case against Arafat that will link him definitively to terrorist acts and discredit him in the world’s eyes.

Wilkinson reported from Ramallah and Curtius from Bethlehem.