- As the debate ensues between the US and Israel as to whether or not Israel will capture, exile or kill Yassir Arafat, the Candian-based “Middle East Newsline” reported this week that the U.S. directly intervened to prevent the Israel Defence Forces from capturing and neutralizing the Muqata’a, the headquarters of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat.
“Middle East News Line” reported that the US State Department sent a strong directive to Israel to suspend plans to capture Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah over the weekend, even though Israel provided hundreds of captured documents to the US which prove that the Muqata’a.is where the terror campaign against Israel is being planned and directed..
Despite that, US Secretary of State Colin Powell and US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to suspend military plans against the Mukatta.
An Israeli military force had captured a PA ministry about 300 meters from Arafat’s headquarters and established a command post for the capture of the Muqata’a.
The significance of such a planned tactical move on the part of the IDF is that the Muqata’a,is precisely where the terror campaign of premeditated murder has been coordinated for exactly three years.
It is at the Muqata’a where Arafat for the past three years has coordinated of the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and all the PLO Armed groups under one command resulting in more than 20,000 Arab terror attacks which have been conducted from the Muqata’a over the past three years, resulting in the cold blooded murder of almost 900 men, women and children throughout Israel
A rubric of US foreign policy is that all of the Palestinian Arab security agencies need to work under one command.
Arafat’s coordination of all security services at the Muqata’a. fulfilled that US policy directive regardless of the consequences for Israel.
The US has invested more than $100 million in the PA security agencies this year, under the premise that these funds would be allocated to forces loyal to former PA Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Security Affairs Minister Mohammed Dahlan, neither of whom are any longer in power… so the funds have been diverted to forces loyal to Yassir Arafat.
That leaves U.S. funds and U.S. security personnel in a position of training and advising the PLO armed forces who now coordinate terror attacks throughout Israel.
The question remains: Is it too late to avoid an inevitable scenario where an American “advisor” in the service of the PLO “security services” will be killed in a preemptive IDF attack on PLO forces.