Israelis Increase Security Amid Fears of Bombings

JERUSALEM — Thousands of Israeli riot police and soldiers blanketed this holy city Friday as the government warned that it expects Islamic militants to carry out suicide bombing attacks. Diplomats, meanwhile, struggled to stop the violence.

The walled Old City, its streets emptied for the most part of tourists and residents, resembled a war zone. Soldiers and police ringed its stone walls, guarded its gates and nervously patrolled its narrow, cobbled streets.

Hundreds of Muslims, blocked by Israeli forces from reaching the Al Aqsa mosque for midday prayers, gathered defiantly to worship outside the Old City’s walls at the Damascus Gate. Small groups prayed inside the walls in lanes leading to the mosque’s elevated compound. But much of the ancient city, which is sacred to the world’s three major monotheistic religions and usually teems with life, looked like a ghost town.

Palestinian factions had called for a general strike and “day of rage.” They were protesting Israeli attacks Thursday on Palestinian Authority targets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The attacks came hours after an enraged Palestinian mob lynched two Israeli reserve soldiers who mistakenly drove to the West Bank town of Ramallah. Businesses throughout the mostly Arab East Jerusalem were tightly shuttered, but few Muslims responded to the call to pray at Al Aqsa.

As Jews prepared for Friday’s sundown start of the weeklong Sukkot harvest festival, and as thousands of Israelis gathered in the northern town of Or Akiva to bury one of the reservists killed by the mob, the Clinton administration worked to convene a summit to restart negotiations. President Clinton offered to join Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for a meeting in the region as soon as possible.

Clinton scuttled a second day of political fund-raising and campaigning Friday to conduct a frenzy of telephone diplomacy with Mideast leaders. He huddled at the White House with Vice President Al Gore, who broke off his own campaigning to return to Washington.

Clinton sought to line up moderate Arab allies to support a summit, speaking by phone with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI.

“This is a full-court press by the United States, along with several others, to see if we can . . . end the cycle of violence,” said White House spokesman Jake Siewert.

Privately, both Palestinians and Israelis said that intensive contacts were underway and that a summit might be called as early as Sunday. But publicly, none of the parties welcomed the U.S. offer.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa said the time was not ripe for such a meeting. Arafat said he would attend only if an international commission of inquiry was appointed first to determine who was responsible for the last two weeks of violence. Israeli acting Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said, “The situation between us cannot stand another fiasco,” a reference to failed peace talks held last week in Paris.

The Americans, Israelis and Palestinians said they would meet only after a halt to the violence, which has claimed nearly 100 lives, most of them Palestinians, and left thousands wounded. But a quick end to the bloodshed seemed unlikely.

Israeli tanks continued to blockade towns and cities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Firefights erupted in Hebron, Ramallah and Bethlehem, and a Palestinian was shot to death by Israeli troops in Hebron. About 100 Palestinians were reportedly injured in the clash.

More clashes were reported between troops and demonstrators when hundreds of Palestinians marched on Israeli army roadblocks in several areas.

An Israeli army spokesman said reports Thursday that a third Israeli, possibly a hitchhiker, had been killed with the two reserve soldiers in Ramallah appeared to be unfounded. A third body wasn’t turned over to the army, and there is no soldier unaccounted for, according to the spokesman.

The daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot reported that a third body, burned beyond recognition, was delivered Thursday to Abu Kabir, the national forensic laboratory where autopsies are performed. No one claimed that body, and the army has no evidence that it was related to the lynching.

The army said Friday that it was on high alert after leaders of the militant Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements were released from Palestinian jails.

“The last time this was done was in February and March of 1996,” said Yarden Vatikai, spokesman for the Israeli army, referring to a series of bombing attacks in Israel. “At that time, over 60 people were killed in terror attacks inside Israel. The atmosphere is the same right now.”

The army, he said, is braced for attempted bombings as Israelis head out to malls, parks and beaches to celebrate Sukkot.

Nowhere were the security precautions more evident than in Jerusalem, where the violence that has derailed seven years of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking first erupted Sept. 28 after Ariel Sharon, leader of the right-wing Likud Party, staged a controversial visit to the Al Aqsa compound.

The army continued its Oct. 6 closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Tens of thousands of Palestinian workers are being kept from their jobs in Israel, and no one from those territories is allowed to travel to Jerusalem except in cases of medical emergencies.

Throughout the city, police stopped cars whose drivers appeared to be Arabs, checked identification papers and searched trunks. Muslims found police forbidding entrance to the Al Aqsa area, which is called Temple Mount by the Jews and Haram al Sharif by the Arabs, to anyone younger than 45. In the end, only about 3,500 Muslims were at the mosque at midday, about one-tenth the normal attendance for Friday prayers.

National Police Cmdr. Yehuda Vilk defended the heavy police presence and the restrictions.

“We are not denying people the freedom of worship but rather are acting against the freedom to riot,” Vilk told a news conference. “When we have concrete information that people are going to light a match on the Temple Mount in order to reignite the flames, then we will limit access.”

Abdul Nasser Marazik, from Bethlehem, said he had traveled a circuitous route around Israeli army roadblocks to get to Jerusalem for the prayers at Al Aqsa, only to be turned away by a solid line of Israeli police officers.

“They are keeping me from going to the mosque,” he said angrily. “This is heating up the atmosphere here. The situation is getting worse day by day.”

Marazik predicted that clashes would erupt if the police did not relent. Indeed, some of the hundreds of Muslims who unrolled their prayer rugs and prayed outside the Damascus Gate began hurling stones at officers, and police responded with tear gas. They beat some Palestinians with batons, reportedly injuring at least two people. But it was a small skirmish by the norm established here in two weeks of running battles between Palestinians and the police.

On Friday, Barak told Israel Television that he hopes to put together a national emergency government by Monday or Tuesday to confront what many here are calling the nation’s most serious security crisis since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Elected 15 months ago on a promise that he would make peace with Syria and the Palestinians, Barak is actively wooing Sharon and the leaders of several small right-wing parties. With the support now of only 30 members of the 120-member Knesset, or parliament, Barak must broaden his base if he hopes to survive after lawmakers return in two weeks from their summer recess.

Barak has said he has nothing to lose in joining with right-wing parties if the Palestinians are not going to be a partner for peace.

Diplomats were still trying hard Friday to prove that there is a partner. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other envoys continued to try to broker an end to the violence that erupted after the controversial visit by Sharon, a former general hated by the Palestinians.

Emerging Friday night from the latest in a series of meetings he has had with Arafat, Annan said there would be a summit within 48 hours--if Arafat’s Cabinet approved the Palestinian leader’s participation.

Meeting in the French Atlantic resort of Biarritz, European Union leaders gave support to calling an emergency Middle East summit.

“Time is running out,” the leaders of the 15 Western European countries said in a statement. “We appeal to the parties to take part, in a constructive spirit, in a summit meeting in order to resume dialogue with all urgency.”

Many Palestinians, however, are urging Arafat to continue the uprising, which some Palestinians are calling their war of independence. They point to the street protests in Arab and Muslim countries as evidence of support for using armed resistance rather than peace negotiations to gain a Palestinian state.

After prayers in Cairo on Friday, worshipers at the Al Azhar mosque shouted, “Jihad!” (Holy war!) and hundreds stormed into the streets, chanting anti-Israeli slogans and demanding the Egyptian army defend the Palestinian people.

Similar demonstrations were held in Amman, Jordan, where Palestinian refugees make up much of the population, and in a Palestinian refugee camp in Sidon, Lebanon, where demonstrators called on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to “destroy Tel Aviv.”

The Lebanese army stopped demonstrators in the city of Tyre from reaching the border with Israel, after the Israelis said they would shoot anyone throwing rocks and other projectiles over the fence. Israel is still hoping to win the release of three of its soldiers captured on the border last week by Lebanese Hezbollah Shiite Muslim militants.

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Times staff writers Melissa Healy in Washington and John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris contributed to this report.

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OPTIONS NARROWING

The Israelis and Palestinians have both abandoned the trust-building peace process. A18