The Israeli security cabinet decided at an emergency meeting to break off all contact with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, accusing him of doing nothing to crack down on "terrorism."
The dramatic move followed a Palestinian ambush on an Israeli bus in the West Bank that killed 10 people and a double suicide attack in the Gaza Strip that injured four Israelis.
"The government of Israel holds chairman Arafat directly responsible for these attacks," an official statement said after the more than three hour cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv convened by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"Chairman Arafat has made himself irrelevant as far as Israel is concerned and therefore no contacts will be maintained with him," it said.
The cabinet statement said that the army would be deployed rapidly in cities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to "carry out arrests and to confiscate weapons."
It said that defense officials would present to the cabinet as soon a possible plans to combat leading Islamic militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad "in light of the escalation of their attacks."
The Palestinian Authority, under enormous Israeli and US pressure to rein in extremists, had condemned the attacks and immediately ordered the closure of all the offices of radical fundamentalist movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
But Arafat's move did not stop Israel from unleashing a wave of air strikes on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank towns of Ramallah and Nablus in response to the latest violence.
"Israel will defend itself by its own means and considers Yasser Arafat is out of the game and that there will be no more contacts with him given that he has done nothing against terrorism," an Israeli official told AFP.
But Israeli officials said they did not intend to target Arafat directly or to destroy his self-rule authority that was set up in 1994 after the signing of the Oslo peace accords the previous year.
"The cabinet decision does not include any directive to attack Arafat personally," Israeli cabinet secretary Gideon Saar told reporters at the end of the meeting.
"We consider that Yasser Arafat can no longer be a partner for the peace process and that we can only count on ourselves," added Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit.
"That is why the army has received orders to root out terrorism," he said, adding however that Israeli has "no intention of destroying the Palestinian Authority."
The official statement said the two Gaza suicide bombers and a Palestinan gunmen shot by Israeli forces after the bus attack were from Hamas and were on a list of 33 wanted "terrorists" submitted to US Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni and to the Palestinians.
But it said: "In the last few days the PA has stopped making any real arrests." -- AFP
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