JERUSALEM - Israeli police safely removed a large bomb from an apartment building in a village near the West Bank on Friday, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, charging that Yasser Arafat is responsible for terrorism, called on the United States to cut off the Palestinian leader. <br>
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Residents discovered a suspicious bag in the stairwell of their apartment building in Tsur Hadassah, a village just inside Israel near the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Police explosives experts inspected the bag and discovered the bomb. They removed it and blew it up harmlessly. <br>
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Israel Radio reported that the bomb included parts of a mortar shell, indicating it had been planted by Palestinians.<br>
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In Israel's north, police closed roads and set up roadblocks Friday for the second time in two days because of warnings of terror attacks. The main road across northern Israel was closed for four hours Thursday after police said they had intelligence that Palestinians were planning attacks in the area. <br>
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Sharon has blamed Arafat for encouraging terror attacks against Israel. Israeli tanks have surrounded Arafat's headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah, confining him there for the past two months. <br>
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In an interview published Friday, Sharon said that in their meeting next week, he would tell President Bush to boycott and ignore Arafat. He noted that the United States is also stepping up its pressure on the Palestinian leader, suspending a mission by envoy Anthony Zinni to arrange a truce, despite Arafat's requests to send Zinni back to the region. <br>
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``We succeeded, after hard work, to present to the world the real Arafat,'' Sharon told the Maariv daily. ``The world knows that this is a man who set up a coalition of terrorism.''<br>
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Palestinian Cabinet minister Ziad Abu Zayyad criticized Sharon's recommendations and called on the United States to reject them. ``The outcome will show us whether American policy decisions are drafted in Tel Aviv or in Washington,'' he said. <br>
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Sharon's visit to Washington will be his fourth in the past year. Bush has yet to invite Arafat, who was a frequent visitor to the White House of Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton. <br>
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Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was to meet Friday in New York with Palestinian Parliament Speaker Ahmed Qureia, a key negotiator. They have drawn up an outline for a political settlement that includes a Palestinian state, but Sharon told Maariv, ``I don't accept the paper as Peres presented it.'' <br>
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Abu Zayyad said Qureia's presence in the United States is meant to show that ``we are trying our best to find a political solution to the conflict and to drop Sharon's plan to drag the whole area to bloodshed.'' <br>
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A member of Sharon's Cabinet, Tourism Minister Benny Elon of the far-right National Union bloc, said Friday that his party is resurrecting the concept of removing Palestinians from the West Bank, a notion his party calls ``transfer.'' <br>
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Elon told Israel Radio that ``transfer'' should be part of a negotiated peace accord. In deciding the fate of the West Bank, he said, ``there is a need to uproot people,'' and since he believes Jewish settlements must not be removed, the Palestinians must be moved to neighboring Jordan. <br>
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Elon's original party, Moledet, was formed on the basis of the ``transfer'' concept, which never gained support in the Israeli mainstream. The idea was dropped from the platform of the right-wing bloc Moledet joined for the 1999 parliamentary election. <br>
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In the Yediot Ahronot interview, Sharon dismissed the transfer idea as ``impractical,'' then adding, ``I reject its legitimacy.'' Palestinians, who claim the West Bank as part of a state they want to create, call the transfer concept racist.
