Sharon eyes option of large-scale military offensive

Choices run out as bombing attacks continue.

Three options awaited Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, on his return from Washington last night: expulsion of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, a sweeping invasion of the Gaza Strip, or an escalation of the Israeli army's raids on West Bank towns.

As ever, the fate of Mr Arafat was at the top of Mr Sharon's agenda, but the killing of 15 Israelis in a suicide bombing at a snooker club gave added momentum to the now routine calls from the Israeli right to eliminate the Palestinian leader.

The mainstream Ma'ariv newspaper said in an editorial yesterday: "Yasser Arafat? Last night it again became clear, for the umpteenth time, that there is no point and no justification in relating to him as a future partner for talks - this liar, inciter, violent, murderous and corrupt man who built a Palestinian Authority that served and still serves as a framework for terror, an instrument fuelled by violence and hatred."

Other commentators doubted that Washington - or even Mr Sharon's coalition partners in the moderate Labour party - would tolerate the exile of Mr Arafat. Although the Palestinian leader is almost universally loathed in Israel, he is a grim fact of life, they argued.

"Maybe the extreme parties in the government would like to do it, but the majority would never agree," said Avraham Tamir, a retired Israeli general and military analyst. "Only the Palestinian people can choose if they want Arafat, or if they don't want Arafat. We cannot replace him, and I don't think exile is an option because, after all, even the mighty Israel has not got the strategic freedom of action to do everything it wants."

However, Martin van Creveld, a military historian at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, believes that Israel stands on the brink of a full-scale war, which would begin with the banishment of Mr Arafat, and end with the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.

"I think Mr Sharon is waiting for the day when he can throw out all the Palestinians. It is not so very difficult. I think these attacks are playing straight into his hands," he said. "I think he wants to escalate the situation because he feels there is no way Israel can make peace with the Palestinians, and he is just waiting for the opportunity to throw them all out."

Such a notion - coyly referred to as "transfer" in Israel - was once the preserve of the far right. But it has gained greater currency in recent months. Opinion polls last month showed that 44% of the Jewish Israeli population endorsed the mass expulsion of the Palestinians. "Israel is becoming desperate, and people who even a few months ago would never dream of such a solution are beginning to think it is the only possibility," Mr van Creveld said.

A more practical option for Mr Sharon, in the immediate future, is a large-scale military offensive against the Gaza Strip, invading and occupying the Palestinian towns in this territory much as Israeli tanks rolled into virtually all of the towns of the West Bank on March 29.

Mr Sharon and other Israeli officials have been telegraphing their intention to invade Gaza for some time, and a preliminary police report that the attacker who struck at Rishon Letzion on Tuesday night was from the territory provides an immediate pretext.

However, other analysts doubt the effectiveness of that strategy. In military terms, an invasion of Gaza is a far more difficult proposition than the offensive in the West Bank. The largest refugee camp in the territory - Jabaliya, near Gaza City - has a population of 100,000. The Jenin refugee camp, where 23 soldiers were killed and where Israeli soldiers stand accused of carrying out war crimes, has fewer than 15,000 inhabitants.

Antagonising

It is also unclear what an invasion of Gaza would accomplish in military terms. Although Mr Sharon told Israeli reporters on the plane to Washington that the offensive in the West Bank had delivered a critical blow to the suicide bombers, it was evident on the return journey that he succeeded only in buying time.

The last fatal suicide bombing in Israel was on April 12, when a Palestinian woman blew herself up in a Jerusalem market, killing six people. After mobilising 20,000 Israeli reservists, antagonising the international community and deepening the damage to the local economy, Mr Sharon bought Israelis only 25 days of calm.

Some commentators argued that an attack on Gaza would play directly into the hands of Hamas, which opposes a negotiated peace with the Jewish state. "Israel need not rush into this," wrote Ze'ev Schiff, a military commentator for the Ha'aretz newspaper. "It must be planned with intelligence, for minimal casualties, with pinpoint targets."

Such doubts about launching another full-scale offensive were growing in Israel's security establishment as well. "We may very possibly choose methods other than those of the previous operation, perhaps other directions, on a different scale, perhaps without widespread mobilisation of reserves," the Israeli army spokesman, Brigadier Ron Kitrey, told army radio.

That means an intensification of the raids on West Bank towns that have carried on despite a formal end to Operation Defensive Shield. Israeli tanks and troops remain within striking distance of Palestinian cities in the West Bank, and have carried out almost daily incursions into towns such as Tulkaram, Nablus and Hebron, which are supposed to be under the control of Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority under the Oslo peace accords.

Most analysts believe that Israel has no interest in a permanent occupation of the West Bank because that would force it to shoulder the responsibility of feeding the Palestinians. Instead, Mr Sharon is intent on wiping out the Palestinian police forces - and so erasing one of the main products of the Oslo peace accord.

But whatever option Mr Sharon chooses, it was taken for granted yesterday that a ceasefire with the Palestinians was not among them.