An Israeli assault helicopter rocketed a van carrying Palestinian commanders yesterday in the West Bank, killing one and critically wounding a second in what the Palestinians angrily said was a deliberate assassination.
The deadly aerial attack, in which two people passing by were also killed and 11 injured, came only hours before the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, met President Clinton in Washington, and is sure to further escalate hostilities in the area and make the American leader's task of ending more than six weeks of violence even more formidable.
Mr Arafat, speaking to reporters after his White House meeting, denounced Israel as being to blame for the clashes.
"I am not the one who initiated the violence," he said. "I am not the one who's attacking the Israelis now. My tanks are not sieging Israeli towns."
Palestinians said that the man killed, Mr Hussein Abayat (33), was a senior figure in Mr Arafat's Fatah faction. Israel maintained that he was a member of the Tanzim militia, which has led the recent uprising, and that he had been involved in shooting attacks on Israeli troops, in which three had been killed, and on a Jewish neighbourhood in a disputed area of Jerusalem.
Mr Khaled Salahat, another Fatah commander, was seriously injured in the early-afternoon attack on the streets of Beit Sahour, a well-off Christian suburb of Bethlehem, which is under full Palestinian control.
One eyewitness said he saw the green van "jump in the air" after it was hit by a rocket, while another man who observed the attack from his balcony said that all he could see were "pieces of meat on the ground". Palestinian medics, who arrived on the scene shortly after the attack, scraped up pieces of burned flesh from the area around the mangled, charred remains of the van.
Senior Fatah leaders said the attack was an assassination directly ordered by the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, and army chief-of-staff, Gen Shaul Mofaz, and they vowed to take revenge. "It is a cowardly aggression and a dangerous escalation," said Mr Marwan Barghouti, a senior Fatah official in the West Bank and a leader of the Tanzim militia.
"This will not prevent Fatah from pursuing the Intifada, and Israel will be held responsible for any response that will take place." In a leaflet distributed after the attack, Fatah leaders announced that the movement had placed Israeli army chiefs on its "wanted" list.
In the Gaza Strip yesterday, Palestinian medical officials said an 18-year-old man was killed in clashes with Israeli troops, bringing the number of people killed in the violence which began in late September to over 180, the vast majority of them Palestinians. The State Department said Washington would be looking into the attack but refused to condemn Abeyat's killing or call it an assassination.
Israeli helicopters have been used during the six-week uprising to blast Palestinian infrastructure targets in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Ramallah after a Palestinian mob bludgeoned two Israeli soldiers to death in Ramallah on October 12th. But until yesterday Israel had confined its attacks to buildings belonging to the Palestinian security forces and had issued advance warnings to the Palestinians to clear the area.
Mr Mofaz conceded that the attack could well lead to an escalation in the short term but he asserted that it was a message to the Palestinians that Israel would not tolerate anyone who tried to hurt its soldiers or its citizens.
A statement released by the Israeli army said the attack was "an initiated activity targeting the ringleaders of the intensification of the violence".
The assault was the first real sign of a readiness by Mr Barak to initiate pre-emptive strikes.