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Israel Unleashing Enormous Firepower Against High-Profile Palestinian Targets
Aired December 04, 2001 - 07:04 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Israel, of course, is showing the power of its military this morning, especially of its air force, unleashing enormous firepower against high profile Palestinian targets. The attacks follow suicide terrorist attacks over the weekend that killed more than two dozen Israelis.
CNN's Jerrold Kessel has the very latest from Jerusalem this morning.
Can you describe to us the impact of those strikes that happened just about 35 minutes ago?
JERROLD KESSEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Paula, good morning.
Well, the Israelis, in the wake of those suicide bombings, those devastating weekend suicide bombings, yesterday Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, declared, you could say, an all out war on terror. And at the same time his Israeli coalition government designated Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority as an entity that supports terror and with all the attendant implications of such a designation of the Palestinian Authority.
And they were translating that into action, military action this morning. It began yesterday with those attacks on the symbols of Mr. Arafat's power down in Gaza, these helicopters, the Gaza International Airport, where the runway was plowed up and made inoperational.
And today, air strikes across Gaza and the West Bank. Eight targets in all in two waves of strikes conducted by the Israeli air force. The most serious in terms of casualties came in the heart of Gaza City, where one military compound hit and apparently by F-16 Israeli war planes. Two Palestinians are reported killed there by medical services and around 100 hurt.
But elsewhere, the casualties are not reported as serious. But the most significant, perhaps, attack in terms of symbolic intent and of message giving, as an Israeli helicopter missile attack on the compound of Yasser Arafat, his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah. And unlike the attacks last night, which were on the presidential compound in Gaza, Mr. Arafat this time was in that compound, in the very building next to the one that was hit. He was working there at the time. You heard him saying very bluntly that this was clearly an attempt by Ariel Sharon, as Mr. Arafat saw it, to try to stop the peace process from going anywhere. He said he is trying to stop us, stop me from doing what I promised to do, to stop[ the terror.
That's the Palestinian view enunciated by Mr. Arafat.
The Israeli view is he's not doing that and they're acting in order to try to force him to do just that -- Paula.
ZAHN: Jerrold Kessel, thanks so much for that update.
And in an exclusive interview with CNN just this morning, Arafat says he believes he's being set up by Ariel Sharon.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
YASSER ARAFAT, PRESIDENT, PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY: He don't want me to succeed. And for this, he is escalating his military activities against our people, against our towns, against our cities, against our establishments.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAHN: Joining us now is former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Good morning, sir. Thank you so much for joining us.
EHUD BARAK, FORMER ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: Good morning, Paula.
ZAHN: I wanted to quickly bring our audience up to date, specifically what has happened this morning. Israeli planes, of course, attacking buildings adjacent to Arafat's headquarters. He was in that adjoining building at the time.
Is the goal of the Israeli government to kill Yasser Arafat?
BARAK: No, I don't believe that person is a human being. He's a target. But it's clear that under his leadership, deliberately the Palestinians turned to a terror campaign. He is responsible. He is a terrorist thug and he's sophisticated, I should tell you, even skillful, a manipulator of words and a liar.
When he tells you Sharon is trying to stop me, it's a kind of straightforward lie. Arafat had an opportunity. I was the prime minister just a year and a half ago. Together with President Clinton we put on the table an offer that could basically solve the problem. He refused even to negotiate it and turned deliberately to a terror campaign.
He should be held responsible and I believe that the Israeli government is doing the right thing. That's exactly what your government and any other government would do under the same situation.
ZAHN: But there are people within the Israeli government, including Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, that think the government is going too far. In fact, he walked out of meetings before this declaration of the war of terrorism was made yesterday. What do you make of that? BARAK: I believe he will be in the meetings once again very shortly. These are slight differences of nuances that any democracy enjoys. Unfortunately, Arafat does not have this kind of system within his own backyard. But it's clearly a series of events where the decision of Arafat systematically closing his eyes to suicide attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad and systematically allowing people directly accountable to him, from within his own security services, to carry out terrorist attacks against civilians, innocent kids and womens and elderly people, that's terrible and it's time to put an end to it and to judge him based on his behavior, not based on his fragile look and the kind of low toned rhetoric.
ZAHN: Mr. Barak, you've just made it very clear that you believe Mr. Arafat couldn't say yes to the deal of a lifetime. It is quite clear, even fellow Palestinians are saying this on camera this morning, that he can't control the more extremist elements of his population. Where, then, does it go from here?
BARAK: First of all, he could make the decision the same way that President Sadat made a decision and King Hussein made the decision to make peace with Israel. But he doesn't have the character. That's true.
It's not true that he cannot control. If his own personal continuation of kind of governing the Palestinians was at stake he would take the steps in order to put an end to it and the reason that he doesn't do it, that he doesn't feel the pressure heavy enough. I believe that only when it will become clear to him that he is about to lose his power unless he begins seriously to take the terror challenge kind of head on, it's only then that he might consider doing the right thing.
ZAHN: You say the goal is not to kill him at this point, but do you think he will survive these retaliatory strikes politically? And if he doesn't, who do you have your eye on that could potentially fill up the leadership vacuum?
BARAK: You know, after failing once and again to seize the opportunity, you know, our legendary foreign minister, Abba Eban, once said that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And Arafat repeats it.
Once he loses all the opportunities, we don't have any alternative but to defend our own people and stop asking questions about the future. You cannot ask who will replace Saddam Hussein when you are fighting him. You didn't ask him about other despots and dictators and major rogue leaders.
From our experience, we have to wait. I am optimistic basically at a certain point -- it might take five years or 15 or two years -- at a certain point a Palestinian leader will emerge that will take care of the future of his own people as well as of the norms of international behavior and will put an end to it.
He will find the Israeli people ready to response once he is ready to behave like a Sadat or King Hussein. But let me add, Paula, one very important point. I believe that Arafat should be put to the test according to his actual behavior. If he's rewarded at this point by the world, not just Arafat, but also bin Laden and other rogue leaders, will interpret it as the first victory of the 9-11. He cannot be rewarded for this terror neither by Israel nor by the United States or the free world.
ZAHN: Mr. Barak, we're going to have to leave it there this morning, the former prime minister of Israel. Thank you very much for your time, sir.
BARAK: Thank you, Paula.
ZAHN: Appreciate your joining us.
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