BARAK: CEASE RIOTING

OR IT'S WAR

Sunday,October 8,2000

By URI DAN and KATE PEROTTA

Israeli Prime Minister

Ehud Barak is

demanding Palestinian

chief Yasser Arafat put a

halt to the bloody

attacks in the West Bank

by tomorrow - or face

all-out war.

The Israeli leader's

stunning ultimatum yesterday came as:

* Three Israeli soldiers were captured by the

terrorist group Hezbollah during an apparently

carefully planned am-

bush on the Lebanon-Israel border.

The militants said they kidnapped the soldiers in

the name of the 12-year-old Palestinian boy

who died in his father's arms as the world

watched amid gunfire in the Gaza Strip last

week.

* President Clinton embarked on desperate

round-the-clock negotiations with both sides,

canceling fund-raising events yesterday to

phone Barak and Arafat beginning in the wee

hours of the morning.

* Palestinian teens ransacked the Jews' holy site

of Joseph's Tomb, hitting it with hammers and

tearing to shreds Hebrew prayer books, shortly

after Israel abandoned the site earlier in the day.

* Israeli tanks were deployed early today to

protect the Jerusalem suburb of Gilo after four

days of sporadic shooting from a neighboring

Palestinian village.

* Barak canceled all flights into or out of a

Gaza Strip airport, except for Arafat's plane, in

response to the shooting of eight Israeli border

guards who were leaving the

Palestinian-controlled terminal.

"If we do not see a change in the patterns of

violence in the next two days, we will regard

this as a cessation by Arafat of the peace

process ... and we will order the army and

security forces to use all means at their disposal

to halt the violence," a visibly exhausted Barak

told reporters during a hastily called press

conference in Tel Aviv.

"We will not submit to violence. We are a small

nation, but strong and brave, and whoever tests

us with force will receive an immediate and

forceful response," Barak said.

"With one simple order, he can stop the

violence," Barak said of Arafat.

Barak gave Arafat until the end of tomorrow,

after the Jewish High Holiday of Yom Kippur,

to rein in his forces.

Arafat's top adviser, Nabil Aburdeneh, accused

Barak of employing "blackmail that can only

lead the region to wars we don't want," but

stopped short of saying whether the Palestinian

leader would heed his ultimatum.

Barak said he held Syria, Lebanon and the

Iranian-backed Hezbollah responsible for the

soldiers' kidnapping, and demanded the

soldiers' release, but also refused to say what

action Israel would take if they were not handed

over.

Israeli forces remained on high alert as fighting

that has gripped the region for more than a

week continued to rage.

At least 80 people, mostly Palestinians, have

died and nearly 2,000 more have been injured in

the clashes.

Fighting was so heavy that Israel retreated from

Joseph's Tomb, in Nablus in the West Bank,

for the first time in the face of Palestinian

opposition.

But yesterday, Barak called the retreat

"temporary."

By last night, another Jewish holy site, Rachel's

Tomb, on the road between Jerusalem and

Bethlehem, was coming under heavy Palestinian

fire too.

With the renewed fighting, Barak came under

increasing pressure to quell the combat.

"Until now, I told the Israeli military to keep its

restraint, not to initiate but only react," Barak

said. "If the Palestinians will not stop the

violence, we'll regard it as the end of

negotiations, and we will order our military to

take steps to eliminate this violence.

"We probably are entering into a new situation:

a struggle for our right to live in Israel," he said.

"The picture which has emerged is that

probably we have no partner for peace ... [but]

our hands are clean because we turned every

stone in order to arrive at peace," he said.

Earlier in the day, Arafat had blamed Israel for a

"dangerous escalation against the Palestinian

people, the Arab people, the Lebanese people

and against Islamic and Christian holy places."

Barak said he has been meeting with Israeli

opposition-party leaders, such as Ariel Sharon

of the Likud party, to gather support for a joint

emergency government in the event the violence

continues.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the militant group

Islamic Jihad praised Hezbollah for the brazen

kidnapping.

"This will give us a push to continue our

struggle against the occupiers," Nafez Azzam

said. "What happened today at Joseph's Tomb

and what happened in Lebanon proves that

fighting is the only solution with them."