OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 5 July — An Israeli minister said yesterday that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his lieutenant Marwan Barghouti should be put to death as the Palestinian leader pressed on with a major security reshuffle. West Bank preventive security chief Col. Jibril Rajoub was replaced with Jenin Governor Zuheir Manasrah. The same decree named Rajoub as governor of the northern town of Jenin.
At the same time Palestinian police chief Ghazi Jabali submitted his resignation to Arafat and decided to run for presidency in elections slated for January 2003. Arafat later appointed Jabali as police adviser.
Israeli minister without portfolio Effi Eitam, leader of the extreme-right National Religious Party, called for killing Arafat while speaking on public radio after being quoted by the daily Maariv as making similar remarks in a speech in a Tel Aviv synagogue.
Eitam said Barghouti, who was detained by Israeli troops in Ramallah in mid-April on suspicion of involvement in anti-Israeli attacks, should have been on Israel’s list of activists to be eliminated. “He deserves death, but we brought him to Israel and are now obliged to concern ourselves with his legal status,” he said.
“Arafat and his gang of murderers, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israelis, deserve death,” Eitam added.
Maariv had quoted him as demanding why Barghouti was being held for questioning, and adding, “He should be taken to a field and a bullet put into his head.”
Eitam also said, “Arafat is a crazy murderer who should be killed,” according to Maariv.
Eitam is a former general whose party is considered the voice of Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories.
But, the head of Israel’s left-wing opposition warned yesterday of “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Palestinian territories, blaming US President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
“President Bush should have known that his speech (last week) would spark a reoccupation of the Palestinian territories and humanitarian catastrophe,” said Yossi Sarid, head of the left-wing Meretz party on army radio.
“The United States, the Europeans and the United Nations have to do everything they can to relieve the suffering of the Palestinian population, and to deliver food and medicine,” he said.
“We should remind President Bush and Ariel Sharon that starving a civilian population constitutes a crime against humanity for which someone will be held accountable,” he said.
In Gaza, a senior Palestinian official said Arafat served Rajoub with his dismissal papers, apparently resolving the confusion over Rajoub’s status.
But a preventive security officer in Ramallah said he and a group of colleagues sent a petition to Arafat earlier yesterday protesting at the way in which Rajoub was dropped and against the move itself.
In Ramallah, the mayors of the twin West Bank towns of Ramallah and El-Bireh said they had refused approaches by Israel, whose army has reoccupied the West Bank, to cooperate on running the conurbation.
In another development, two Palestinians were killed after a blast ripped apart their car as they were driving through Gaza City yesterday, an AFP correspondent at the scene said.
The two men were driving down a street when a “very strong explosion” rocked their car, after which the vehicle burst into flames, he said.
In Nablus, seven Palestinians were injured yesterday when an Israeli tank opened fire on a communal taxi near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, Palestinian medics here said.
The medics added that ambulances sent to pick up the injured, whose condition was not immediately known, had been refused entry to Nablus by the army and had been forced to head north to Jenin.
