MIDDLE EAST: The Palestinian Authority president, Mr Yasser Arafat, yesterday rejected the harshest criticism to date of his government by the Bush administration, as Israel thwarted what it said were five more suicide bombers.
Ms Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's National Security Adviser, said in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News:"Frankly, the Palestinian Authority, which is corrupt and cavorts with terror is not the basis for a Palestinian state moving forward."
As for Mr Arafat's personal future, she issued a ringing non-endorsement: The PA needed to be radically reformed, to build "the institutions of a state", she said. "Arafat - the chips will fall where they may."
The Senate majority leader, Mr Tom Daschle, for Mr Arafat's departure: "I don't think we can force it ourselves", he said "but I do think that it's necessary in order to reach some peaceful arrangement".
But the Palestinian leader was defiant. Neither Ms Rice, nor any other outsider, he declared, could dictate to the Palestinians. "We are doing what we see as good for our people and we do not accept any orders from anyone," he said.
Mr Arafat also castigated Israel for its massive new fence-building project along the West Bank border, calling it a "fascist, apartheid measure" and pledging to "reject it by all means".
The fence is to run roughly along the 1967 border; the initial maps indicated it would extend into occupied West Bank territory at many points.
Israel's Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, dismissed both Palestinian objections and complaints from Israeli settlers insisting the fence was solely to thwart suicide-bombers, several more of whom, he said, had crossed or were about to cross into Israel.
A 16-year-old Palestinian who blew himself up alongside a police patrol on the West Bank border, said the minister, was one of five bombers about whom Israel had firm intelligence warnings. The bomber was killed, but no one else was injured.
Near Bethlehem, an Israeli sniper shot dead Walid Sabiah, 30, in his car. The army said he was a recruiter of suicide bombers for the Al-Aksa Brigades.