Season of Revenge

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The tanks rumbled into Ramallah as dawn broke and thunder rolled on Good Friday. Yasser Arafat knew they were coming after him. Barricaded in a windowless two-room office, he could only sit and rant as much of the Israeli force entering Ramallah--100 armored personnel carriers, 60 tanks and 2,500 soldiers--encircled his compound, their gun barrels swinging into position for a vengeful assault. Arafat worked the phones, dialing diplomats around the world, beseeching them for help. Sources inside Arafat's office told TIME that Arafat warned of a bloody battle between his forces and the Israeli army, hoping that prospect would prompt the international community to force the Israelis to desist. He phoned the Jerusalem hotel room of Anthony Zinni, the U.S. special envoy to the region, and pleaded with him to tell his bosses in the Bush Administration to stop what was about to happen. "It's an attack on me personally," he said. "They want to get rid of me."

He was right. Israeli government sources told TIME that hours before the assault on Arafat's compound--retaliation for the Passover slaughter by a Hamas suicide bomber of 20 Israelis and a tourist in the seaside city of Netanya--Prime Minister Ariel Sharon informed members of his Cabinet that he wanted to send forces into Ramallah to arrest Arafat and expel him from the Palestinian territories. "We should send Arafat away, out of the country," Sharon said. "We should not let him stay." But the heads of Israel's intelligence and security agencies all argued that releasing Arafat from the four-month confinement in Ramallah that Israel has imposed on him and pushing him abroad would embolden him to collude openly with terrorist groups and organize strikes against Israel. Cabinet ministers told TIME that at 5:30 a.m. Friday, Sharon settled on a different strategy: Israel would officially identify Arafat as an enemy, "isolate" him in his Ramallah headquarters, destroy the surrounding buildings and arrest or kill Palestinian militants they believed had holed up inside--but would stop short of raiding Arafat's bunker. "The only commitment we've made," Police Minister Uzi Landau told TIME, "is not to kill him."

To hard-liners in the Sharon government, that qualifies as restraint. To much of the rest of the world, the Israeli offensive that followed, though born out of months of simmering rage at Palestinian terror and Arafat's inability or refusal to stop it, was a staggering display of aggression. It was also potentially the most dangerous escalation yet in a war that people on both sides plainly hate but find impossible to escape.

While the Israelis insisted they did not plan to kill Arafat, they successfully made him think they would. On Saturday, after tanks had leveled much of the compound, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at the remains of Arafat's redoubt. At 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Arafat called one of his Cabinet ministers, Nabil Shaath, in the Jordanian capital of Amman. His voice shaking with fear, Arafat ordered Shaath to call Arab and European leaders. "Tell them the Israelis are going to take over my office," he said. The Israelis said they sought the surrender of several high-ranking Palestinian militants thought to be hiding out in the compound.