Israeli missiles kill militant, bodyguard

HEBRON - An Israeli helicopter gunship killed a leading Palestinian militant and his bodyguard in a missile strike yesterday, the first attack of its kind since Israel began winding down its West Bank offensive.

The attack on a car in Hebron apparently targeted Marwan Zuloum, identified by Palestinian sources as the local commander of an armed group linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction and responsible for deadly assaults on Israelis.

Hundreds of angry people took to the streets of Hebron screaming for revenge after the men's charred bodies were pulled from the burning wreckage.

A senior Palestinian official accused Israel of assassination. Previous killings of high-ranking militants have often led to deadly suicide attacks on Israelis.

The missile strike followed a day in which Israeli troops kept Arafat's headquarters and Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity under tight siege and a US envoy seemed to make little progress in talks on the crisis with the Palestinian leader.

"I would not say that it was a positive meeting," Mohammed Rashid, an adviser to Arafat, said after a session between United States Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and the Palestinian President at his encircled compound in Ramallah.

In other developments yesterday:

* Israel's strategy of keeping some Army troops on the outskirts of Palestinian-controlled territory was rejected by the US State Department, which renewed a demand for a total withdrawal from the West Bank.

The department also did not support Israel's demand that the Palestinians surrender suspects in terror attacks.

Spokesman Richard Boucher said Arafat's Palestinian Authority claims jurisdiction over the wanted men, and it is up to the two sides to work out a settlement.

The department's position on Israeli troop deployments and on terror arrests gave further evidence that, after tilting in Israel's direction for months, the Bush Administration has taken a more neutral stance.

* A top Democrat in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that the Senate would stand by Israel.

"Israel has always had fair-weather friends. What it needs now are foul-weather friends," he told the lobby group in Washington.

Daschle drew cheers as he denounced what he called growing anti-Semitism in Europe, citing the rise in France of extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and a move by Norwegian Nobel Committee members to recall the Nobel Peace Prize given in 1994 to Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

Peres shared the award with Arafat and Israel's Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered by an ultra-nationalist less than a year after he accepted the award.

* United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan named a team to look into Israel's devastating assault on the Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank.

He picked former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari to lead the fact-finding mission, which will include Sadako Ogata, former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and Cornelio Sommaruga, former Swiss head of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Palestinian officials welcomed the appointments, but Israel Radio reported that Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had complained that Annan had not consulted the Israeli Government.

The UN mission to Jenin intends to meet in Geneva late tomorrow, and Ahtisaari said he hoped it would leave for the region by the end of the week.

* With troops gone from the centre of Ramallah and Arafat's battered security forces unable to reassert their authority, masked Palestinian gunmen killed one alleged collaborator and wounded two others, witnesses and hospital officials said.

Palestinian officials said Israel was to blame because it had arrested or killed policemen who could have kept order.

* In Bethlehem, heavy gunfire erupted again at the Church of the Nativity, where soldiers are locked in a 20-day standoff with gunmen holed up inside.

- REUTERS

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