Killing stalls Mideast peace effort

The bullets that assassinated one of Israel's best known politicians, Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, yesterday quickly threatened to claim a second victim: the already fragile Middle East cease-fire.

Within hours after Zeevi was gunned down outside his hotel room in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was pointing the way toward a hard-hitting military response and comparing the challenge posed by the shooting, only the second political assassination in Israeli history, to the terrorist atrocities in the United States on Sept. 11.

"A new period has begun," he said. "As President Bush said, from today onwards the situation is different."

The killing placed the Middle East at its most dangerous point since the Sept 11 attacks. It threatened to destroy weeks of diplomacy by the US aimed at cooling off the Palestinian-Israeli conflict so that it would not disrupt Washington's war coalition.

While the mood among members of the Israeli Knesset was ominous yesterday, and Mr. Sharon fingered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and vowed an "all out war" against terrorism, analysts differed over whether or not his government could still be constrained by US pressure. They stressed that a prerequisite for Sharon to hold back would be action by Mr. Arafat against the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which claimed responsibility for the shooting. The PFLP said it came as revenge for the August slaying by Israeli forces of PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa in the West Bank.

Mr. Mustafa was the highest ranking political leader among dozens of people assassinated by Israel over the past year. Israel has justified the killings on the grounds that those slain were involved in violence.

In the West Bank, Israeli troops began to reverse steps they had taken on Sunday to buttress the cease-fire. Soldiers at the northern and southern entrances to Ramallah began reimposing a siege on the city, cutting it off from other towns in the West Bank. There was speculation, but no hard evidence, that the assailant had come from Ramallah.

Palestinian Authority Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo condemned the attack. "We reject all forms of political assassinations," he said, calling for an end to a "vicious cycle of killings."

Mr. Abed Rabbo said the authority bore no blame for Zeevi's death. "The one who should be held responsible is the man who is waging war against the Palestinian people for more than a year," he said, referring to Sharon.

But Israeli leaders warned that words alone would not be enough. "If there is no change in the Palestinian Authority's attitude towards terror, the whole thing will go up in flames," said Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the leading proponent of diplomacy with the Palestinians.

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