Israel chokes off Palestinians' travel

JERUSALEM -- As funerals got under way Monday for 22 victims of Sunday's twin suicide bombings in downtown Tel Aviv, Israeli leaders stepped up efforts to punish Palestinians and their leader, Yasser Arafat, for the attacks, which were carried out by a militia faction linked to Arafat's Fatah political movement.

The Israeli security Cabinet voted to ban Palestinian officials from traveling within the occupied territory of the West Bank, which is riddled with Israeli military checkpoints, as well as to London for a mid-January conference on political reform.

Israeli authorities also threatened to close three Arab universities on the West Bank. The schools incite Palestinians to commit terrorist attacks, charged Raanan Gissin, senior adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Gissin initially named Bir Zeit and An Najah universities -- the West Bank's most prestigious and largest institutions of higher learning, respectively -- as those likely to be shut. However, Gissin later said that Israel had not completed the process of collecting evidence and that a final decision on which universities to close had not been made. Gissin did not name a third university.

Unlike Sharon's past reactions to massacres by Palestinian terrorists, there was no immediate sweeping military response. Israel did launch a short attack late Sunday, with Apache helicopters firing missiles on metalworking factories in the Gaza Strip that Israelis charge are used to build terrorist weapons.

On Monday, house-to-house searches by Israeli troops were limited to neighborhoods in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. The suicide bombers in Sunday's attacks came from Nablus, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, which claimed responsibility for the attacks.

"They (terrorists) want to provoke Israel to take a major action, but they will not succeed," Gissin said.

Sharon and his Cabinet opted not to exile Arafat, Gissin said, something Israeli officials have contemplated many times before. "Let him stay in his kennel at the Mukaata; we have better control over his actions there," Gissin said, referring to Arafat's headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah, where the Palestinian leader has been holed up for nearly 13 months.

Though Israel's measures were condemned by Palestinian spokesmen, they were perceived by Israeli commentators as relatively mild. Israeli newspaper reports said the government's retaliatory options were limited. Sharon has promised the United States he will not harm Arafat, and the West Bank is already under a tight Israeli siege.

Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat charged that Sharon's actions are aimed at toppling Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.

"We condemned the attack on Tel Aviv, and we were going to London precisely to talk about ... how to break this vicious cycle," Erekat said Monday night. Israel's latest actions "prove my point that Sharon is not fighting terror, he's fighting the Palestinian cause."

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