Hisham Abu Taha, Arab News

JERUSALEM, 25 April 2004 — A defiant Palestinian President Yasser Arafat yesterday dismissed new threats against his life by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, saying he would love to embrace “martyrdom”.

“All of us are martyrs-in-the-waiting,” Arafat said in the compound of his headquarters in Ramallah, where some 4,000 people chanted slogans in his support.

“I want to tell Sharon and his gang that the mountain cannot be shaken by the wind,” Arafat thundered.

Sharon, in comments that could rally support in his right-wing Likud party before its May 2 vote on his Gaza pullout plan, said Friday he no longer felt bound by a pledge he made to US President George W. Bush not to harm Arafat.

“I release myself from this commitment regarding Arafat,” Sharon told Israel’s Channel Two television in his strongest verbal threat yet against his long-time adversary.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington expected Sharon to keep his promise to Bush. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice phoned Sharon’s chief of staff to voice opposition to any move against Arafat, a US official said.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei blamed open US bias toward Israel for emboldening Sharon to threaten Arafat.

Bush enraged Palestinians and the Arab world last week when he broke with decades of US policy by endorsing Sharon’s bid to hold onto some large Jewish settlement blocs on West Bank land captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

He also backed Sharon’s denial of a right of return for Palestinians dispossessed in the 1948 war of Israel’s creation, and millions of their descendants.

Qorei said in a statement that harming Arafat would end any hope of Israeli-Palestinian peace and open a new chapter in more than three years of violence.

Arab League chief Amr Moussa also condemned Sharon’s threat. “I denounce these dangerous threats against President Arafat,” Moussa told journalists in Cairo.

In fresh violence, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians in the West Bank. In Jenin, Palestinian security sources said undercover troops shot at a car carrying two activists, killing them and a 16-year-old boy walking home from school.

An Israeli military source, giving a different account, said soldiers surrounded a house where Palestinians planning a bombing were holed up and killed two wanted men and their teenage “accomplice” in an exchange of fire.

One of the men belonged to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the other to Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian security sources said.

In a village near Jenin, soldiers killed an Islamic Jihad activist and wounded another member of the group outside a coffee shop, witnesses said.