Sharon defeats Netanyahu in Likud leadership vote

11.40am

JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has won his Likud party's leadership election, a vote overshadowed by deadly attacks on Israelis in Kenya and northern Israel.

An aide to challenger Benjamin Netanyahu said the foreign minister telephoned Sharon to congratulate him on his victory.

The hawkish Netanyahu conceded defeat after television exit polls showed Sharon had crushed him in the right-wing party's ballot, a first step towards retaining the Prime Minister's post the former general has held for almost two years.

In a general election set for January 28, Likud is widely expected to beat the centre-left Labour Party because Israelis have shifted to the right in the face of Palestinian gun and suicide bomb attacks in a two-year-old uprising for statehood.

Channel One television gave Sharon 61 per cent of the vote compared to 37 per cent for Netanyahu among the 305,000 Likud members.

A Channel Two poll put the figures at 58 per cent to 40.5 per cent.

Lior Horev, a Sharon aide, said the Prime Minister gave a low-key response to the television exit polls' findings.

"He saw the polls and immediately went back to work. It is not a happy day for anyone," Horev said on Channel Two.

Security is the burning issue for Israeli voters, a point underlined by a suicide car bombing at a hotel in Kenya that killed three Israelis and a missile attack that failed to hit an Israeli airliner taking off from a nearby airport.

Hours later, a Palestinian gun rampage in northern Israel killed six people.

The Likud contest pitted Sharon, a veteran warhorse, against a former Prime Minister who tried to outflank him on the right by opposing the notion of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu, 53, led Israel from 1996 to 1999.

Sharon, 74, had dodged Netanyahu's barbs on security and Israel's ailing economy by laying the blame for the country's woes on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and unleashing fierce army offensives in Palestinian-ruled areas.

But in a nod to Israel's main ally, the United States, Sharon has had to avoid a sharp intensification of the conflict with Palestinians that could harm US efforts to win Arab support for possible war on Iraq.

The Likud ballot went ahead despite the early morning suicide attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya's Indian Ocean resort of Mombasa that killed 15 people. Two of the three dead Israelis were children.

Minutes before the suicide bombers struck at the Paradise Hotel, missiles nearly hit an Israeli airliner taking off nearby.

The Arkia Boeing 757-300 with 261 people on board landed safely in Tel Aviv.

Israeli and Kenyan officials swiftly blamed the al Qaeda network, but Washington said it was premature to point the finger at the group it holds responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States.

In a fax sent to Reuters by a Lebanese media organisation, the previously unheard-of "Army of Palestine" claimed responsibility for the Kenya attacks. Police said they were questioning two people seised near the scene of the hotel bomb.

While Israel was reeling from the attack on a holiday spot where many Israelis have sought a respite from violence at home, two Palestinian gunmen went on a shooting spree at a Likud polling station in the northern Israeli town of Beit Shean.

Six people were killed and 34 wounded before the gunmen were shot dead.

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, said it carried out the attack to avenge the deaths of two militant commanders in the West Bank on Tuesday that they blamed on Israel.

The Palestinian Authority says Israeli military raids and its army's reoccupation of West Bank cities provokes violence, but it condemned the attack in Beir Shean, saying it damaged the Palestinian national cause.

In the West Bank city of Hebron, a three-year-old Palestinian boy died of shrapnel wounds. The boy's father said Israeli soldiers shot him while he was standing in a window.

Israeli military sources said an explosive device thrown at soldiers patrolling the area hit the wall of the boy's home and caused his wounds. They said soldiers did not return fire.

At a Tel Aviv news conference before the Likud results were in, Sharon accused the Palestinian Authority, Arab states and "terror organisations" of using violence to influence Israeli elections.

The Prime Minister sidestepped questions on which political party he believes they want to see in power in Israel.

- REUTERS

Herald feature: The Middle East