RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) -- Israeli troops stormed Yasser Arafat's headquarters complex Friday and moved room to room toward the Palestinian leader, knocking through walls and trading fire with his guards in a building where Arafat took cover in a windowless office.
Five Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed, 25 of Arafat's guards were wounded and 70 Palestinians were arrested in the assault on this West Bank city, launched after Israel declared the Palestinian leader its enemy. The Cabinet approved a large-scale campaign in response to anti-Israeli attacks that killed 30 people in three days.
In the latest Palestinian attack, an 18-year-old woman blew herself up at the entrance of a Jerusalem supermarket, killing herself and two shoppers and wounding about 20 others. The Al-Aqsa Brigades, a militia linked to Arafat's Fatah movement, said it sent the bomber.
Despite the violence, the White House said Thursday its envoy, Anthony Zinni, would continue his mission trying to forge a cease-fire. "We have followed developments overnight and this morning in the Middle East," spokesman Sean McCormack said. "Gen. Zinni remains in the region, is in contact with the parties and continues his work." Zinni met with Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat and spoke to Arafat by telephone.
Two dozen Israeli tanks swarmed through Arafat's walled compound, an area the size of a city block with numerous structures. After the three-story building with Arafat's offices came under heavy tank and machine gun fire, Israeli troops broke into adjacent buildings and punched holes in walls, moving toward the office building.
At one point, the Israelis traded fire with Arafat's guards in the office building through a hole in the wall of an adjoining structure.
With a submachine gun placed next to him on a table, a defiant Arafat spoke by phone to world leaders and demanded immediate international intervention. "They want me under arrest or in exile or dead, but I am telling them, I prefer to be martyred," Arafat said in a telephone interview with Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television channel. "May God make us martyrs."
Erekat said Israel's "endgame is to kill Arafat," an accusation that Ranaan Gissin, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, dismissed as "nonsense."
Israel plans to isolate Arafat within his office and not physically harm or arrest him, said an Israeli government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
He said the surrounding buildings in the compound were part of the Palestinians' "terrorist infrastructure," contained large stores of illegal weapons including rocket-prepelled grenade launchers, and would be dismantled. By nightfall, 70 people had been arrested in the compound, the official said.
The Cabinet approved a large-scale offensive, agreeing to the callup of thousands of reserve soldiers, but it was not known whether operations would take place elsewhere besides Ramallah.
Sharon said Israel had sought a cease-fire in good faith, "but all Israel got in return was terrorism, terrorism and more terrorism."
Arafat announced on Thursday night his "readiness for an immediate implementation of the (U.S. truce) plan without any conditions." But he stopped short of formally declaring a cease-fire.
Israeli police also stormed the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, using stun grenades to disperse stone-throwing Muslim worshippers.
Friday's assault was closest Israeli fire has come to the Palestinian leader, targeting for the first time Arafat's office building -- though Israel has repeatedly hit other buildings in the compound where he has been confined for months.
As the Israeli Cabinet met overnight, tanks rolled into Ramallah, and soldiers exchanged fire with Palestinian gunmen. Four Palestinians and an Israeli soldier were killed in the fighting.
The tanks then stormed Arafat's compound, breaking through its outer walls. An army bulldozer punched a large hole in the stone wall of one building and soldiers streamed in. Israeli snipers took positions on rooftops. Tanks shelled the Palestinian intelligence headquarters in the complex, severely damaging it, and troops stormed a lockup adjacent to Arafat's three-story building. One Palestinian was killed in the compound and 25 wounded.
The fighting came a day after an Arab summit in Beirut approved a plan that calls on Arab nations to develop normal relations with Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from territory captured in the 1967 Mideast war. The plan marked the first time in more than a half-century of Mideast conflict that Arab states have made such an offer. Israel said it would study the plan, but that its top priority was responding to Palestinian attacks.
Palestinian refugees demonstrated in camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to protest the Israeli assault in Ramallah. Arafat said the assault on his compound aimed to scuttle the peace offer. "This is the Israeli response to any peace attempt. Because they don't want peace, they don't want peace," he told Abu Dhabi television.
The latest escalation began with a suicide bombing by the Islamic militant group Hamas on Wednesday in a hotel in the Israeli resort of Netanya. The bomber blew himself up in the hotel's banquet hall, among 250 Israelis gathered for the Passover Seder, the ritual meal ushering in the Jewish holiday. Twenty-two diners were killed -- one died of wounds Friday -- and more than 130 were hurt, putting the attack on par with a suicide bombing outside a Tel Aviv disco last June that also killed 22 people.
The bombing was widely seen as a turning point in the fighting, with Sharon coming under growing pressure from an outraged public to respond harshly. The bombing was followed by two attacks on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that killed six Israelis, and the suicide bombing in Jerusalem.
Sharon did not explain what branding Arafat an enemy would mean in practical terms, but left open the possibility that the Palestinian leader could be expelled from the Palestinian territories at a later time, as several Israeli Cabinet ministers have demanded.
Earlier this month, the Israeli military carried out an extensive operation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, sending 20,000 soldiers into towns, villages and refugee camps in a hunt for Palestinian militants. That operation was the biggest since Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
