ISRAEL: Israel said yesterday it had intercepted a ship smuggling 50 tons of mostly Iranian weaponry to Mr Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.
Officials described the haul - dozens of crates containing Katyusha rockets, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, mines, guns and explosives - as the largest such PA-bound consignment it had ever seized, and stressed that the PA was forbidden to hold much of the weaponry under the terms of its various interim peace accords with Israel . The PA said it had nothing to do with the shipment.
The Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, said the seizure proved the PA was planning "long-term terrorism and escalation" against Israel. The army's Chief of Staff, Gen Shaul Mofaz, said there was "clear and undeniable" evidence that leading PA officials had organised the smuggling attempt.
Gen Mofaz said that the ship, the Karin-A, had been purchased by the PA, that its captain was an officer in the PA's naval police, and that crew members arrested when Israeli naval commandos boarded the ship were also PA naval officers. The ship was intercepted overnight on Thursday in the Red Sea, in international waters 300 miles off the Israeli coast.
Mr Yasser Abed-Rabbo, the PA's Information Minister, denied any PA involvement in the shipment and urged the Americans to join the PA in exposing Israel's "theatrical game".
Mr Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a senior adviser to Mr Arafat said: "We know nothing about this ship. We consider it Israeli propaganda in order to sabotage the mission of General Zinni."
Mr Abu Rudeineh was referring to the US Middle East envoy, Mr Anthony Zinni, who held talks here yesterday with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to try and broker a formal intifada truce and pave the way to a resumption of peace negotiations. After meeting Mr Arafat in Ramallah, Mr Zinni said he was "optimistic" about the prospects for progress, and said security chiefs from the two sides would resume their meetings.
But in the wake of the arms seizure, the Israeli leadership was sounding more skeptical than ever about the chances of making any headway so long as Mr Arafat was leading the Palestinians. Even Mr Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister and co-recipient with Mr Arafat of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, said the Palestinian leader was playing "a double game" and had yet to take a strategic decision on "whether or not to abandon terrorism". After a spate of suicide bombings and attacks last month, Israel branded the PA "an entity that supports terrorism".
Mr Arafat and his colleagues have strenuously denied this. In an Israeli newspaper interview yesterday, Mr Ahmed Qurei, Speaker of the Palestinian parliament, said the PA was "making a 100 per cent effort" to thwart attacks.
But Gen Mofaz was adamant yesterday that the weapons seizure proved the government's point. The PA was "contaminated by terrorism from head to toe," he said. "Official elements in the Palestinian Authority were involved in the smuggling attempt, including senior members of the Palestinian naval police." If the cargo had reached its destination, it would have "dramatically raised the threat faced by Israeli civilians and soldiers", he added.
The Israeli military analyst, Mr Ron Ben-Yishai, said that the long-range Katyusha rockets would have brought "almost any target inside Israel within range" and that the other weaponry would have enabled the Palestinians to mount more effective resistance to Israeli tanks and other forces in their periodic incursions into PA territory.
In one such incursion yesterday, involving tanks and helicopters at a village outside Nablus, Israeli troops killed a Hamas activist in a gunbattle and arrested two others. The men were involved in last month's Hamas attack on a bus and other cars outside a West Bank settlement, in which 10 Israelis were killed, Israeli officials said.
A spokesman for Mr Sharon said the names of the Hamas trio were on a list of intifada militants given by Israel to the PA even before last month's attack, and that if they had been arrested, it could have been prevented.
Palestinian officials said that the raid was designed to disrupt Mr Zinni's mission, and noted that Israeli troops killed another leading Hamas militant shortly before the American envoy's last trip visit to the region, at the end of November.
The Karin-A, which was towed by the Israeli navy to port at Eilat yesterday, was seized without a shot being fired in what Gen Mofaz described as a "daring and complex" operation. It was the second such shipment intercepted in the past eight months, but the Israeli military described this cargo as far more dangerous than that captured aboard the Santorini, which was seized last May. Israel said the PA had organised that shipment as well; the PA denied it.