Surging Middle East fighting crept closer to all-out war as Israel pounded Palestinian security targets in an offensive it said would end only if Palestinian President Yasser Arafat yielded.
A day of strikes against Palestinian targets across the West Bank and Gaza Strip culminated late on Wednesday in an attack on Arafat's West Bank headquarters where the Palestinian leader has been practically confined by Israel for three months.
Arafat was meeting European Union Middle East envoy Miguel Angel Moratinos in his office when a missile slammed into a store room in an adjacent building. No one was hurt.
Israel said the attack, which followed a heightened wave of air strikes against Arafat's headquarters and compounds belong to his Fatah faction, was part of its "war against terror."
In Gaza, Israeli naval boats fired two missiles and machine-gun rounds at a naval security installation, causing extensive damage and wounding 10 naval policemen, one of them seriously, Palestinian security officials said.
As tit-for-tat fighting reached new heights, Washington weighed in with a rare rebuke to Sharon and the United Nations warned the violence had got "completely out of hand."
Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rdainah called the Ramallah missile attack "a very dangerous strike" and said Arafat was talking on the telephone with Israel's dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres, when the missile hit his compound.
Peres made noises earlier on Wednesday about leaving Sharon's coalition if the government tried to use greater force to end a 17-month-old Palestinian uprising against occupation rather than engage in dialogue with Palestinian leaders.
But a defiant Sharon told Israeli troops the military campaign against the Palestinian Authority would be unrelenting until "the other side understands it cannot achieve anything by using terror (then) it will be easier to start negotiations."
Sharon's popularity in opinion polls has dropped to an all time low as he struggles to satisfy right-wing coalition partners' demands for intensive military force against the Palestinians and leftist pressure for peace talks.
POWELL LASHES OUT AT SHARON
Thirteen Palestinians were killed in several incidents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Wednesday and two soldiers were killed during an incursion in Gaza after a Palestinian rocket hit a southern Israeli town for the first time, wounding a baby.
Secretary of State Colin Powell told a congressional hearing in Washington he was skeptical that Sharon's plan to use military force against the Palestinians until negotiations resumed would work.
"If you declare war on the Palestinians and think you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed -- I don't know that leads us anywhere," Powell said. He also repeated the routine US appeal to Arafat to do more to crack down on Palestinian militants who attack Israelis. "He has a responsibility to bring these groups under control ... Mr. Arafat has to do more, can do more, must do more," he said.
The bloodshed alarmed the European soccer body UEFA which suspended all European competition matches in Israel and switched a March 14 UEFA Cup quarter-final tie between Hapoel Tel Aviv and AC Milan to a neutral venue.
Internationally renowned Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim was barred from going to Palestinian-ruled Ramallah to perform on Wednesday by Israel's army which said it could not guarantee his safety.
Earlier, tanks, warplanes, helicopter gunships and gunboats struck at targets in the Gaza Strip against what it called a "terror network" behind a wave of Palestinian attacks that have increased political pressure on Sharon.
The strikes and counter-strikes have taken the conflict to a new level of intensity and pushed the toll up to at least 958 Palestinians and 313 Israelis killed since the uprising began in September 2000 after negotiations for a peace treaty stalled.
(China Daily March 7, 2002)
