Palestinians Round Up Bomb Suspects Israel Tells Arafat That He’d Better Join Wholeheartedly In Crackdown

Palestinian police, investigating two suicide bombings that killed 27 people Sunday, rounded up scores of Islamic militants Tuesday in the West Bank and Gaza and identified two Palestinians as suspects, saying they have been missing from their homes at a refugee camp in Hebron for several days.

Later the Israeli military chief met with Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, to tell him face to face that Israel expected a tougher crackdown than ones he has initiated in the past.

After reviewing a third incident, police in Jerusalem again revised their judgment of the case of an Arab-American who plowed into a group of people at a pickup point, killing a woman and injuring 22, and said it appeared to be a deliberate attack. The driver, Ahmed Abdul-Hamid Hamideh, was shot dead at the scene by armed Israeli settlers.

Israeli police had at first said the incident was a terrorist attack, then said it was probably an accident. Tuesday, after further investigations at the site, and after newspaper accounts describing Hamideh as a man who fervently embraced Islam in recent months, police said that “in all probability” the driver intentionally drove into the crowd. The pickup point he struck is frequented by Israeli settlers hitching rides to West Bank settlements.

The meeting between Arafat and Lt. Gen. Amnon Shahak, the Israeli army chief of staff, was one of several stern reactions by Israel to the bombings.

The most severe reaction was to seal Gaza and the West Bank to travel both in or out, with warnings that the closure could last a long time, perhaps until after the national elections on May 29. A U.N. official in Gaza, Terje Larsen, warned that such a prolonged closure would seriously damage an already fragile economy and breed more violence and extremism.

In a speech to the Parliament on Monday, Prime Minister Shimon Peres declared an all-out offensive against Hamas, including stiff demands on Arafat to do more.

Arafat, obviously stung by the summons to a dressing down, arrived an hour after Shahak for the meeting at the Erez checkpoint at the border to the Gaza Strip. The general reportedly handed Arafat a list of the 10 most-wanted leaders of Hamas, the Islamic resistance organization, and described specific ways Israel believed that the organization could be broken.

The men most wanted by Israel are Mohammed Deif, who is believed by Israeli intelligence to be the head of the violent wing of Hamas known as the Qassam Brigades, and Mohi Eddin Sharif, a bomb maker believed to have succeeded Yahya Ayyash, “the Engineer,” who allegedly introduced suicide bombings into the Hamas arsenal.

Ayyash was killed last month by a booby-trapped cellular phone widely believed to have been the work of Israeli agents. Leaflets distributed after the bombings said the attacks were the revenge of his followers.

Neither man was among about 120 Islamic militants picked up in the Gaza Strip and West Bank on Sunday night. Most of those arrested were said to be known Hamas members or supporters, plus a few members of another militant group, the Islamic Jihad, but they reportedly included only one alleged member of the Qassam Brigades. The best-known detainee was Muhammed Taha, a recognized Hamas leader from the Al-Bureij refugee camp in Gaza.

On Monday, Arafat told foreign officials that Israeli extremists who are determined to sabotage the Israeli-Palestinian agreements had supplied Palestinian fanatics with explosives for the bombings. Arafat, who presented no evidence of that charge, has made similar accusations in the past.

Arafat also reportedly told foreign officials that he did not intend to attack leaders or institutions of Hamas not linked to the armed wing. Arafat has made extensive efforts to strike a deal with the political forces of the movement, whose leaders have said they have no link to the armed militants.

The gravity of the incident for Israelis was underscored by the immediate impact of the explosions on the election campaign. Within hours, the commanding lead enjoyed by Peres, the architect of the peace agreements, over his conservative challenger in the May 29 election, Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud party, shrank to almost nothing.

At a meeting with American Jewish leaders, Peres suggested that Israel might delay its last scheduled withdrawal, from Hebron, if Arafat did not cooperate.

A delay on Hebron could be a serious blow to Arafat’s standing. Hebron, with its cluster of militant Jewish settlers, was the most difficult issue of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations last summer.

Tensions between the Israelis and Palestinians were evident in the police handling of the incident in northern Jerusalem in which Hamideh, the Arab-American, drove into a crowded pickup point.

One of the men who shot him, a 20-year-old yeshiva student, was shown on the evening television news receiving a plaque of gratitude from a conservative member of Parliament.